Mitch Evans: It was scary at times

Jaguar works team driver Mitch Evans took his second consecutive win of the year in Berlin yesterday to move him up to 4th in the Formula E individual standings. third in the team standings, trailing its closest rivals, Envision Racing, by just a few points.

Since we have known Mitch for a long time, since he played in the GP2 series for the Russian team Russian Time together with Artyom Markelov, we try to follow closely the progress of the New Zealand driver.

Evans is now in his seventh season in Formula E and was vice world champion last year, but in the first races of 2023 he was plagued by setbacks, he could not get above 7th place. And it was only in the previous stage in Brazil that he finally won, and on Saturday in the German capital he again solved the matter best.

In addition, the events of yesterday’s race developed according to a completely insane scenario, and one could easily make a mistake or accidentally become the victim of an incident, but Evans was well versed in all this track confusion and achieved a well-deserved victory. .

“We made good progress (on the car) between qualifying and the race and that certainly helped,” said Mitch after the finish. – We had a very confident race and so far our car is clearly the best on the track. That was just breaking through the traffic very difficult, but the race in Sao Paulo was good training in that respect.

Actually, it was scary at times. There was a serious risk that the domino effect would work, so you just had to try to avoid situations where you accidentally got into the throes of the cars ahead, and you also had to trust the guys behind you – in that they will also act with caution.

It was very difficult to control the situation, but I was lucky – I just managed to slip forward at the right time and take the race to victory. The slipstream on this circuit was not as efficient as in Sao Paulo, but it was certainly one of the factors here as well.

With the new generation of cars, the nature of the battle on the track has changed considerably, and to be fair, the races now take place according to a completely insane scenario. I took the lead with 17 or 18 laps to go, but it was too early. I tried to act thoughtfully and the team helped me break through the pack. The duel with Sebastien Buemi was quite correct, after which they gave me the green light to attack Sam Bird, my partner – in my opinion, I was ultimately capable of a good pace. It was enough to open a gap and finish first.”

Now Mitch is gearing up for the second race of the Berlin weekend in the hope that he and the team can find some reserves of speed, and dreams of repeating yesterday’s success: “It would be nice to win the second race, and I’ll try to do it, but you can’t be greedy. After Sao Paulo I already have two victories in a row. We hope that by Sunday we can add a little more and increase the speed of the car even further.”