Senna: ‘I just had to focus on what I was doing’

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After his best ever qualifying, Mahindra’s Bruno Senna took his first podium in Formula E, and Mahindra’s best result in the series. Senior editor Bethonie Waring spoke to him after the race.

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“It was a tough race. Energy management was super difficult but we had a good car, we good energy management. Nico was too fast for me. So I decided very early that I was going to do my own race. My engineer was giving me information about the pace and I just had to focus on what I was doing. I knew what was happening inside the car and I knew that I had to continue what I was doing so I was trying to follow Nico and it worked for us. The safety car was always difficult for the end, when we had a nice comfortable gap behind but these things happen in Formula E so we always have to keep some in reserve and I know that if it was a faster car behind me after the restart I could hold him.”

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“Both. I wanted to attack Nico because I didn’t know how his pace and his energy management would be so on the first lap I was using a little bit to see where he was. Ultimately we both pulled away a little bit from Oliver so I was like “ok, we need to see where he is” and suddenly I saw his pace was stronger and he just had a faster car and he was doing a really good job. So at that point I started to go for the conservative side, make sure that I put enough gap behind me with the right energy usage to have a buffer at the end of the race and it worked out.”

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“It was ok. We had a different strategy to other guys. Because a faster car’s in front of you, you want to keep up with him and see what you can do but it’s one of those things. I think we are actually very competitive. It maybe doesn’t look like it but if the car behind us is holding everybody back, everybody’s saving a lot of energy. I had a clear track so I could do my own pace and my own strategy. I think if we were in the same train our energy would be very good as well.”

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“We have a good car. We have a competitive car. Of course, as you see, here it very much depends on where you start. So qualifying will be very important tomorrow. We need to understand why we had a major issue with the car in qualifying today where I almost crashed. Take that out of the way and then have a clean qualifying tomorrow and we can start again in the top five, so I’m pretty sure we can do a good job tomorrow.”

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Image courtesy of Rajan Jangda

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