“When you listen to what I’m going to tell you, you’re not going to believe it.”
When Sebastien Buemi looks you directly in the eyes and tells you that, you’d better shut up and listen. Last Saturday evening, harborside at Monaco, I did.
His Saturday race at Monaco was essentially as weird a ‘ghost race’ as you may ever get in Formula E today or indeed in the future. A bizarre and complex issue created it, and it played absolute havoc with his and the Envision Racing team’s strategy.
Buemi had qualified in an initial 15th but was docked three places for baulking Max Guenther in qualifying, so started 18th.
Buemi then took his attack mode immediately before the mandatory PitBoost stop on lap 19, following in leader Antonio Felix da Costa, who had also used his 350kW hit. It was here that the very unusual element to his race started to play out.
Emerging from the pits in fifth place, well ahead of podium bound Pepe Marti, Buemi explained that “when I came in to do the pit stop, the car didn’t see the (timing) beacon, so it did not remove the lap and basically I’ve done an extra lap.”
Erroneously saving an extra lap of energy from the it PitBoost onwards, Buemi thus got wrong target information in his cockpit and via his team.
“They told me ‘Oh, but Marti has 2% less than you’ and I said ‘it cannot be’ said Buemi.
“He was lifting everywhere later than me and I have 2% more. It has to be wrong. And then we continued, and at some point, I had 5% more. Then I said ‘listen guys, it just can’t be because even though I have 5% more, I’m still lifting at the same place as them. And then they said, ‘check how many laps there is in the car to go to the end.’ I said five, and they said, ‘no, you should see four.’
That effectively meant Buemi did an extra lap unnecessarily and was forced to remove the lap “in two straights” where he caught Marti, who had got through on attack mode.
“I caught them, and then DAC crashed. Otherwise, I would have passed them back, easy,” added Buemi.
When specifically asked if he could have finished on the podium, Buemi replied that “I would have got Marti easy. But DAC just had the accident one lap too early. Because after we drove at Full Course Yellow, and then their target went high, so then that was it.”
Buemi, working with his longtime engineer Conor Summerville, deployed a killer strategy on Saturday, one that initially began with a ‘super save’ energy plan to gain a full offset.
Buemi completed most of his attack mode during the pit window on his own in a plan that he described as “mega” and “unbelievable.”
“The only problem is that the car, when I came in, missed this beacon. Apparently it happened to Mitch in FP1. So basically, at some point, the car thought that it had done a mega, mega long lap. So, it did not remove one lap.”
The transponder, that is supplied by the FIA, clearly worked fine across the rest of the field, but on the No.16 Envision Jaguar it did not remove a lap and presumed the car had done an extra-long lap.
“Our car, speaking to our software, didn’t see that I crossed, so it thought I did a 7.2-kilometre lap,” added Buemi. And then (the software) said ‘wow, he’s done such a mega lap, and now we need to make him save more to make sure he makes it to the end.’
“But then they (the team) were telling me ‘Oh, you have 2% more” and I said ‘no, it cannot be’.
Essentially the confusing situation was telling the car that it had “consumed three kilowatts and now how do we make it to the end?” according to Buemi.
That was when the car’s software began to divide the amount of laps remaining with the energy left, meaning that the range became very low. In the cockpit Buemi was being overly efficient saving more than he needed to.
Buemi would have been right in the fight with Ticktum and da Costa in what, at that stage, was a battle for third position. Had he dodged that and had a FCT not come out, Buemi would have had far more energy than Drugovich’s Andretti and have likely picked him off with ease in the final few laps.
“I was lucky that I didn’t get involved in an accident, so I was also lucky in that race, you know. So, you have to take the positive. But I got very unlucky with that issue.”
As tales of the unexpected go, Sebastien Buemi and Envision’s 2026 first crack at the Monaco EPrix was right up there. But because of one of Formula E’s more bizarre scenarios, Buemi’s brilliant ascent from 18th to fifth place will always have a bitter/sweet taste.
