Evans’ missed pole “really hurts”

Mitch Evans missed out on a potential pole position at the first race of the Hong Kong ePrix due to an error in timing his qualifying, despite recording the fastest lap of the group stage.

Evans had set the lap record for the Hong Kong street circuit with a 1:02.875 in the second free practice session. However, he was left unable to set a time during group qualifying as he did not start his hot lap before the session was chequer-flagged.

Jaguar’s form last season would have made a pole position virtually impossible – but Evans said he was frustrated to have missed out on the opportunity and that it ‘hurt’ to know how close they had come to it.

Asked if he was surprised by the sudden increase in pace, he said “A little bit, to be honest. I wasn’t really sure where we were at. I was always quite confident over one lap in pre-season testing and that sort of transferred over to this morning, making decent practices and probably should have been battling for pole as well.”

He said it was only by a small margin his lap was disallowed- “I did complete a lap in qualifying but it didn’t count – but it was faster than Sam’s time, so it’s positive but also really hurts because we should have been battling for a podium, I think.”

Starting from the back of the grid after technically not qualifying, Evans was then caught up in the lap one incident that saw the race red flagged “I was inside Alex Lynn into the left of the chicane, over to the left and then over to the right Lotterer – I think he had contact with Nelson or something and just got put into the wall and he just stopped right in front of me.

“I couldn’t move and obviously the guys right behind me just had nowhere to go cus most the corners for the first lap you’re two abreast so that was a shame, I’d already made up I think three places and then for some reason the FIA put me to the back of the grid.”

This is the only Formula E race to have ever been red flagged and the restart became heavily delayed as the FIA attempted to work out which positions drivers should be started from, depending on where they had been on track at the point when the race was stopped.

Evans’ restart was heavily compromised by being sent to the back of the pack, which the FIA appear to have admitted was an error- “No, we’re really not happy about it as a team because it shouldn’t have been the case. Actually now they’ve apologised to us and then I was behind Lotterer and he didn’t go at the start of the restart so I was already 20 seconds behind by the time I got to the start/finish line after the green flag.

“So yeah, it was a mess and it was just one thing after another and it just wasn’t meant to be today but you know, there’s a lot of positives we can take and hopefully we can race well tomorrow and the pace is still there so we can grab some of the points we lost out on today.”