The Briton looked on course for a double Formula E success of the weekend in the second race at the Misano World Circuit Marco Simoncelli having taken the lead with five laps remaining.
Once in front, Rowland began to pull away from the chasing pack with only eventual winner Pascal Wehrlein able to keep in touch.
Entering the last tour of the 26-lap contest, Rowland had opened up a 1.4s advantage over the Porsche driver but had been on approximately 2% less energy in the closing stages, which proved pivotal as he came to a crawl half a lap from home.
Speaking post-race, Rowland admitted that he wasn’t aware of his dire energy situation until “it was telling me it should be the last corner and I was going into Turn 4” and that an issue with the lap counter was to blame for the miscalculation.
“How it works is there should be a lap zero so it doesn’t count [at the start], but for some reason when I crossed the startline it dropped to that, I think it was a miss-procedure,” he told Autosport.
“I was quick in the corners and I was just following my target and I did the strategy as we planned.
“This sort of thing has never happened to us, nowadays it’s such a simple [procedure], it should have been checked and maybe we should have doubted it.”
Source: Autosport