Rookie Talks: Edoardo Mortara

In part two of our focus feature on Formula E rookies, we caught up with Venturi driver Edoardo Mortara right after the his Formula E debut on the streets of Hong Kong.

It wasn’t an easy race for Mortara but after qualifying 19th on the grid, he managed to recover 11 positions to finish eighth in the first round of the double-header weekend. The former Formula 3 Euroseries Champion and DTM driver reveals how he’s slowly adapting to the new challenges that Formula E brings.

Performance

“It was difficult. I mean it’s not up to me to judge my performance but I tried to do my best today but for sure it was not easy because the radio wasn’t working and I was under-consuming energy pretty much the entire race. Then I had some wrong information by the team at some point so it was very complicated for me. I think it was a possibility to finish much further up but nevertheless, we learn from our mistakes that we did today, we will improve and hopefully we will come back stronger tomorrow.”

Expectations

“I was expecting it to be a lot easier because normally you’ll share information with the team and you’re guided by your engineers but today I had zero, I had nothing. I guess if you’re a driver, you would experience Formula E as something you can cope with and as a rookie you can imagine we didn’t do any single long stints in Valencia during the official test. I didn’t do any single long stint in a private test so this was my first real stint where I was trying to save energy and I ended up under-consuming massively. That was a bit of a shame but we learn from this and we will try to improve.”

Adapting

“For sure, it was just my first race in Formula E. I crashed the car this morning. Let’s say it was compromised by (Alex) Lynn in the first place and then I crashed the car from the second last row and i ended up gaining 10 or more places during the race which I think is a good debut. There’s still a long way to go and we still need to improve a lot.”

Lessons

“I think I learned many things today. The good thing when you have massive problems everywhere, you know you have to do everything by yourself and so you probably learn a lot more when it’s like this.”