Old adversaries Jake Dennis and Pascal Wehrlein clashed again in the first Berlin EPrix of the weekend, with the Porsche driver notching up his first non-score of the season after the valve on his right front Hankook broke off after being tagged via contact with Dennis.
“It was such a little contact with Jake Dennis’ front wing, tipping off the valve of the tyre,” Porsche Formula E boss Florian Modlinger Modlinger told FEN.
“No puncture, nothing. Only he kicked the valve off with the front wing. A slight contact so really tough.”
Wehrlein confirmed to FEN that the “contact with Dennis which broke the valve of the rim and basically I had to drive a whole lap” with a deflating left front tyre.
The former championship leader said that the incident was “nothing special” and that he and Dennis were “just driving side by side, it was a tiny contact. It’s not even worth mentioning that contact, it was nothing spectacular.”
“It happened in Turn 9 and I just felt it on the start-finish straight and basically by Turn 1 the whole air was out,” concluded Wehrlein.
But Andretti team principal Roger Griffiths said that Dennis reported Wehrlein had “run him out in to the wall” and that “if you look on the side of Jake’s car you can see damage on the floor.”
Dennis looked as though he was going to challenge for at least a podium after banking good energy in the early phase of the race. There was some confusion during the EPrix when a presumed missed attack mode was discussed on the TV feed but this was not accurate with Dennis stating to FEN that “I didn’t miss it or anything like that as it was just misperceived of my engineer’s comments to me as he basically just counted me down.
“It was said that I’d got three attempts left but it doesn’t mean I’ve missed it three times. It just means I’ve got three more tries to go, that I can go through them three more times. But they thought I’d missed it three times,” detailed the Andretti driver.
He also added that he also left a bit on the table at the pit stop, saying that “there was a bit of (lost time) on pit entry from my side. And also, not a great insert of the charger.
“Before you know it, it’s such a short lap. If you miss one and a half seconds, you get jumped by six or seven cars and that’s what happened.
“We made our life a lot harder. Instead of coming out maybe third or fourth, we came out 12th at the end of the pit boost and it compromised us.”
Dennis’ eventual fifth place and fastest lap of the race mirrored his last best points score in Mexico City and ensured that he consolidated eighth position in the standings, opening up a now 15 point advantage over Sebastien Buemi who finished outside of the points for the first time this season.
With Wehrlein’s non-score too, it means that no drivers now have a 100% points scoring record this season.
