“When you win and everybody is happy, it’s easy, but when you lose that’s when you really need to become one [in the team] and it shows everybody’s character. I think everybody is pushing hard to help me turn this around.”
For a driver so used to success, having dominated the 2019-20 Formula E season en route to the title, the distinct lack of results so far this year for Antonio Felix da Costa have been difficult to accept, even for the usually ever-positive Portuguese driver.
The 2024 season marks da Costa’s second term with the Porsche team and arguably, on paper, could have offered the 32-year-old a platform from which to challenge for the title.
Instead, the opening three races have yielded no points with the most notable moment being a Mexico retirement after a clumsy collision with Nico Muller that also earned da Costa a grid penalty for the following Diriyah double-header, where 16th and 14th were the best he could muster.
To compound his woes, team-mate Pascal Wehrlein convincingly won the season-opener in Mexico City before reigning champion Jake Dennis took his Porsche-powered Andretti machine to a dominant victory in the Diriyah prequel.
“We can see that the package, even when the Porsche factory team isn’t performing, Andretti is or vice-versa,” da Costa tells Autosport ahead of the Sao Paulo E-Prix this weekend.
“So there are very different ways to make this car perform in every kind of situation and I think we just need to really dig in, open our knowledge and start to understand what works for who and where and I think that’s the biggest lesson.”
Source: Autosport