Pre-season Formula E testing continues in Valencia, but Friday was the last full day at the track from morning to evening.
The main event of the morning session was a 27-lap simulated race, with drivers and teams interacting according to the full program followed at each stage of the World Championship, which will consist of 16 races in 2024.
In “the closest possible fighting conditions”, Robin Frijns, who will compete for Envision Racing next season, was in the lead: shortly before the finish he managed to stay ahead of António Felix da Costa. But the Portuguese Porsche driver was unable to hold on to second position as he was also overtaken by Mitch Evans, who had led on both previous test days.
Obviously these results don’t mean much, but those who watched the battle at the Spanish track note that the race, while “not really”, was quite fun. However, something else is more important: the participants practiced using Attack mode, tested their skills in reasonable battery consumption, actions under conditions when a safety car enters the track, and much more.
In the afternoon, track work during testing continued as normal, with everyone following their program. The factory Jaguar team was again the fastest, but this time the best time was set by Nick Cassidy, the current vice world champion, who became Evans’ new partner in the 10th season of Formula E.
Like Mitch, he comes from New Zealand, like Mitch he tried his hand at various championships, but achieved his most significant successes in Japan, where he won titles in all major national series: in local Formula 3, in the Super GT touring car , and then in Super Formula.
Since 2021, Cassidy has been driving in Formula E for Envision Racing, which won the electric teams championship last year, and only lost to Andretti driver Jake Dennis at the end of the season.
Today, during tests with a Jaguar electric car, Nick showed the best time by completing a lap in 1 minute. 24.671 seconds. This is one and a half seconds faster than the best result from last year’s tests in Valencia, shown by Max Gunther.
By the way, Evans did not lose much to him and remained in third place according to Friday’s protocol, but it was he who showed the best test time, and on the very first day. And today, sandwiched between two Jaguar representatives, Gunther, a Maserati driver, moved into second place, losing to Cassidy by just 0.041 seconds.
Robin Frijns, the winner of the morning race, set the fourth fastest time, Pascal Wehrlein, the Porsche driver, was fifth and Norman Nato, the new partner of current world champion Jake Dennis in the Andretti team, was sixth.
The result was even tighter than yesterday: on Friday everyone showed comparable speeds, and 21 drivers of the 22 test participants did so within 0.7 seconds.
Source: F1 News

I am Christopher Clyde, an experienced journalist and content writer with a passion for sports. I have been writing about Formula 1 news for the past five years and am currently employed as an author at athletistic.com, one of the top sports websites in the US.