The new Formula E season could start off in spectacular style this weekend if local Sao Paulo weather forecasts are accurate with some wet weather running on Saturday currently likely.
The new less durable Hankook tyres are said to be ultra-challenging in wet conditions with Lola Yamaha ABT driver Lucas di Grassi describing it as “very marginal on grip” when questioned about it at Jarama last month.
But Nissan’s Oliver Rowland has told The Race that he would relish tricky conditions should they present themselves at the Anhembi Sambadrome track in Sao Paulo this Saturday.
Rowland is among only a few drivers on the grid to have got any meaningful wet weather running with the new Hankook tyres, at Varano in September.
“Clearly, they (new Hankooks) don’t have a lot of grip, and it’s quite hard to get them in the window,” said Rowland.
“But I’m excited about that, yes it might be sketchy, it might be a bit dangerous in some respects, and I think we’re very well protected as race drivers these days, with the safety elements and so many other things that I quite look forward to the opportunity to drive something that’s extremely difficult to drive on the edge.
“That excites me, and I hear a lot of moaning about tyres but honestly, for me, it’s the same for everybody. Everybody has the same four tyres on the car, so if there’s no grip, we just have to drive around it and find the most out of the car.
Rowland, along with drivers such as Robin Frijns and Mitch Evans have a clear reputation for excelling in wet conditions, and he took a memorable pole position at the first Seoul EPrix in August 2022 in the wettest conditions Formula E has ever seen.
“I’ve always liked it in the wet, and I think Seoul was a good example of very, very tricky conditions,” recalled Rowland.
“So, for me, it’s something that I’m quite comfortable with and something that I kind of look forward to, to be honest.
“It could be all that preparation and dry running that we’ve been doing and testing might be null and void let’s say.
Rowland Downplays Favourite Tag
The buzz in Formula E circles since August has long since been that Nissan has made a big step for Season 11 but Rowland was keen to dilute the noise, saying that at Jarama “we thought we were in pretty good shape ahead of that test” but that it was “a little bit of a wakeup call.
“We probably weren’t quite as good as what we had hoped,” he said.
“There was a couple of different things in the track layout that didn’t really seem to suit us, but I hope that we’re in the ballpark. Honestly, without going to the first race, it’s very, very difficult to say (where the hierarchy is), and I think we’ll find out a lot more there.
“When you’re developing a new package you’ve got to think about reliability and development items, all these different things you kind of have to work through a program.
“Actually, before we got to Jarama, we’d not really done any optimizing our package. Then going to Jarama was obviously quite different to most Formula E treks.
“I think we kind of used that test as like, ‘let’s go there and let’s try some things’ and ‘let’s work on kind of refining the car ahead of Sao Paulo.’
Rowland suggested that some surprises could still reveal themselves in qualifying and the race at Sao Paulo this Sunday.
“I think globally, the Majorca test was pretty good,” added Rowland.
There are other fast cars, quite big surprises. The Mahindra seems to have made a pretty big step in terms of pace. And then other teams too, so it depends how much they’re hiding, I guess we’re going to see only when qualifying comes.”
