Season 4 field will be clear “by Sunday night”

Drivers have said that although the field looks open, by the end of the Hong Kong ePrix teams will know decisively where they stand in Season 4 of Formula E.

Speaking about expectations for the year, DS Virgin driver and Hong Kong ePrix rookie Alex Lynn said “It’s hard to say really, I think we need to focus on this weekend and then I think honestly we won’t really know where everyone shakes out until after this weekend and both days because you know what Formula E is like – it throws up some very mixed qualifying results, some very mixed race results.

“From our side, I think we’ll know by Sunday night where we should shake up but I think we’re feeling very positive that the car’s got potential and we’re hoping for some good results.”

Venturi driver Maro Engel agreed that this was the decisive moment for what the rest of the year would look like, saying that prediction before the race was impossible even after testing –“It’s really hard I think, no one really knows where they are so everyone’s a bit… it’s an exciting time of the year, you’ve got to get on track to find out where we are.

“We didn’t have the smoothest test in Valencia, I think that’s quite known but the problems we’ve identified, we’ve worked on quite heavily so we’re quite confident that it should be very different here but where that leaves us, we’ll just have to wait. The aim, for sure, is to score points, as many possible but right now we don’t know where that will put us.”

Jean-Eric Vergne, whose Techeetah team have had even less time in testing than the manufacturer teams, agreed that it was impossible to know anything ahead of the races; “What are we hoping for? First of all, a weekend with no mistakes is the main goal because it’s very hard to say where we stand compared to the others, everybody has new power trains so it’s not the same picture as last year so we’ll wait and see.

“Maybe we have the worst car, maybe we have the best car. Maybe we won’t do any podiums, maybe we’ll be on every podium. It’s very diffficult to say. I hope we have a competitive car to win races and therefore will definitely be fighting for the championship.”

Formula E debutante Kamui Kobayashi, currently signed to MS&AD Andretti for the Hong Kong weekend alone, said he had even less idea what might happen than any of the other drivers – having only been in the car for a power-limited filming day driving in a car park “I’ll just do my best and difficult to say until we’re properly driving.”