Pepe Marti didn’t look particularly phased when he talked to the media less than an hour after his almighty Sao Paulo shunt last month. That was a good sign.
Not just because racing drivers have to shake-off major accidents, more because all eyes were on him as the only rookie of the 2025-26 season. Making it much more visceral was the fact he was in a great position and would likely have finished fifth in that race, if not higher. But in Formula E quite often the higher you are, the further you fall.
So, Marti arrived in Mexico City with a veneer of calm and confidence but if you think there wasn’t some doubt and worry beneath the surface then you don’t know athletes very well. It would have been there, yet curiously the fact he was starting from the back of the grid absorbed some of the doubt, eased a pressure of sorts.
Free Practice one was just what he needed as it was a quietly positive session. Fourth fastest on 300kW power was hugely encouraging, with a. time just 0.001s off teammate Ticktum.
Then FP2. If anyone had the right to be accused of getting up from bed on the wrong side, it was Marti. His entire session wiped out after a technical issue related to the inverters meant a complete powertrain cluster change and a further penalty of 60 places. What that translated to was a 10-second stop/go penalty. In reality that was 45 seconds in and out. Race over.
Not quite. His and the CUPRA Kiro teams only options was to not get lapped (just manageable), have a monster saving early half of the race and then get the team to face the sun, summon up an Aztec God and pray to them for Safety Car salvation. They did, and the Safety Car deity spirits listened.
Hitching up to the back of the snake, Marti inhaled hope once more. It tasted good. Now he could race and potentially bring himself a kind of salvation for Sao Paulo.
He stayed in last place until Lap 21 when Buemi pitted with a puncture under Safety Car but was six to seven percent up on the majority of the field energy wise with both Attack Modes still to go.
He took his first four minutes on Lap 26 and instantly went on the move rising to ninth by Lap 29. Three laps later he went again, and on Lap 34 smashed in a 1m08.313s his fastest lap of the race, trailing former leader Pascal Wehrlein for what looked like a brilliant eight place. That was promoted to seventh when Nico Mueller dropped off the pace on the last lap.
13 places climbed, 15 competitive overtakes with eight of them under Attack Mode. No wonder he was a happy man after the race.
“It’s a great result, all things considered,” Marti told Formula E Notebook.
“First of all, we wouldn’t have been able to fight for the points if it wasn’t for the team as they put together a new car after Sao Paulo, which worked well. Unfortunately, we ran into a powertrain issue this morning, and then we had to fully change it out before qualifying.
“There are things that essentially fall out of your control, so there’s no point in really getting upset about things that you can’t control,” added Marti.
“That’s something that I’ve learned over the last few years. The one thing that we can control is what we were doing in the race, and the team did a fantastic job with strategy.
“We executed the stop and go in the correct manner, which is something that sometimes doesn’t go the right way. The team did a fantastic job and I can only thank them.”
Miami is next up for Marti and he will have the benefit of being able to take part in the extra Free Practice session due to a little known new regulation (Article 4.7 of the Sporting Regulations) that designates any rookie that starts a season as keeping that status throughout the season.
That, when the track is new to the majority of drivers, is when we might just see Marti’s strong start to his Formula E career really begin to bloom.
