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Jake Boxall-Legge

Sette Camara explains "catastrophe scenario" that cost London points

Making his way into the qualifying duels for the third time this season, Sette Camara earned a place in the semi-finals and a draw against championship leader Stoffel Vandoorne - which the Brazilian lost by just over 0.3s over the lap.

Regardless, it was enough for Sette Camara to claim fourth on the grid, which became third at one point during the race as he made a pass on reigning champion Nyck de Vries on lap eight.

But as the race progressed, Sette Camara began to fall back with less energy relative to his rivals, with Dragon suffering from an issue with its systems where it did not know how much energy was being consumed.

Sette Camara then hit zero percent on the final lap, enacting a late tumble out of the points as he was eventually not classified in the race won by Jake Dennis.

"It's a similar movie to what we see in other places, like New York, where I was P4 for quite a while," Sette Camara told Autosport.

"The difference in London, we managed to sustain that for longer. Because this is not an energy sensitive track, because this is a difficult track to overtake.

"It's actually, if you do everything perfect, possible to stay there in P4, P5. Best case scenario today, I think, could have been finishing P5 in front of Askew.

"Worst case scenario, I think we could have finished P9. The scenario that happened was the catastrophe scenario.

"I didn't get the last lap dash, I didn't know how much energy was left in the car and the team didn't know.

Sergio Sette Camara, Dragon Penske Autosport, Penske EV-5, Nyck de Vries, Mercedes-Benz EQ, EQ Silver Arrow 02 (Photo by: Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images)

"We could have managed it much better, if I was given the call to just spread that energy through the last three laps, drive very slowly, you know, we would have at least scored and if our system was were working, I could have kept a flat race to the end.

"And maybe if we had that target since the beginning of the race, we could have had a more efficient race and kept Askew behind and finished P5 or P6.

"We could have left the track with a good point in the bag, or even small points in the bag, but some points - and we ended up with nothing. So it's a bit of a waste."

Sette Camara was keen to stress that it was not the fault of his engineering team, and that his squad is doing an "exceptional" job in battling against better funded outfits with more personnel.

He added that the systems issues can be fixed for tomorrow's second race, but feels he has to repeat his heroics in qualifying to rescue points from the weekend.

"I'd like to highlight that the engineers that are in the team, they're doing an exceptional job," he said.

"It's five guys, and they're super efficient at doing the job of 50 engineers.

"It may look sometimes from the TV that the engineers are not good and whatnot, but actually they're exceptional - just that's it's only five guys doing everything, plus engineering the cars.

Sergio Sette Camara, Dragon Penske Autosport (Photo by: Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images)

"I just want to make make sure whenever I speak about energy management or the car, I also speak about that. It's just something not many people in the house watching on TV, they don't know how small the team is.

"It is something we will get fixed for tomorrow, we already know what happened. But you got to do it all over again, qualify again, blah, blah. And it's not every day that you do that.

"Hopefully, the car's good tomorrow, I'm in good shape tomorrow, and we hook up a good lap in qualifying and put ourselves in the same position as we were today and finally score."

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