Cassidy Wins NYC E-Prix Truncated By Multi-Car Pile-Up
Calum Gill 19:26 16/07/2022
Nick Cassidy has claimed his first Formula E victory in New York despite his Envision car being wrecked in a massive race-stopping accident.
Cassidy was among a group of cars that aquaplaned heavily into the barriers amid a downpour. The weather had changed with 10 minutes of the 45 minutes plus one lap race on the clock, and polesitter Cassidy leading from Lucas di Grassi, Robin Frijns and Stoffel Vandoorne. Three minutes later the leaders encountered a substantial puddle on the approach to the Turn 6 left-hander at the end of the long back straight, with most of them instantly losing control and ploughing into the barriers. Of the lead group, only Frijns made it through unscathed, with Cassidy, di Grassi and Vandoorne’s cars all sustaining substantial damage as they slammed into the barriers and each other. Sébastien Buemi, who had been in the lead group throughout too, also crashed, while pre-race championship leader Edoardo Mortara hit the barriers but managed to get back to the pits.
Pascal Wehrlein’s Porsche stopped on track after his own incident and was collected at low speed by a queue of cars. Efforts were initially made to repair the barriers and get the race going again. But this was abandoned just over 20 minutes after the crash, with the official order reset to before the accident happened. That made Cassidy a Formula E winner despite his heavily damaged car being in the barriers. He had controlled the race throughout, only losing the lead when taking attack modes, and resisting heavy pressure from di Grassi and Vandoorne in particular. Vandoorne had fallen from second to fourth at the start, surged forward in the second half of the race then dropped back to fourth when di Grassi came back at him and Frijns capitalised and got between them.
That meant it was an Envision 1-3 in the official order, with Frijns completing the podium ahead of Vandoorne. Mortara retains his championship lead thanks to Vandoorne’s late loss of places and his own progress from the lower top 10 to fifth in the rain. That was until Mortara received a 5 second penalty post race, dropping him to ninth, that allowed Vandoorne to usurp him of the lead. Buemi and Wehrlein were classified sixth and seventh, ahead of Jake Dennis, Sam Bird and Nyck de Vries. After his poor qualifying, title contender Mitch Evans made little progress and officially finished 11th - though he had emerged third after the crash before countback was applied. That was still better than the fourth championship protagonist Jean-Éric Vergne, who had been spun to the back in a first-lap pile-up also involving Evans, André Lotterer and Antonio Giovinazzi. He finished 18th.
