Not only was Nelson Piquet Jnr’s 2014-15 title success unlikely, it was for many reasons perhaps one of the sweetest revenge stories in motorsport.
Few know that ahead of gaining his seat at the Campos Racing run team that the former Renault F1 driver was largely ostracised and almost blackballed from the championship altogether.
“It was looking like I was going to race with edams and Renault but Formula E kind of seduced (Alain) Prost to put another driver (Buemi) in and also there was a similar issue at Venturi,” recalls Piquet Jnr.
Seemingly at every turn, Piquet, a driver who had been Lewis Hamilton’s only serious GP2 title challenger in 2006, was blocked.
It was the same story at Amlin Aguri but then came an opening with China Racing. The disruption and lateness of the deal led the Brazilian to missing the first two tests at Donington Park ensuring that Piquet’s manager Steve Hewett had to work overtime to negotiate a myriad of political games to get his man a deal.
‘So we started in let’s say the underdog team but before that I wasn’t even able to get in to the Drivers Club. I tried to get in touch with Alejandro but there was no answer in return,’ remembers Piquet Jnr.
The closeness of Agag and Di Grassi’s relationship was supposed to be a factor in all of this. Piquet and Di Grassi had a relationship history going back to karting days and it was rarely good.
At Monaco this manifested itself in a public slanging match after a contretemps in qualify.
Piquet’s disquiet with Agag was largely solved when the pair had a ‘clear the air dinner’ in Punta del Este. But the issues with Di Grassi were too profound and personal to patch up.
Therefore beating Di Grassi and taking the inaugural title was a sweet one for Piquet Jnr, especially in light of the brittle standing of which his team began the campaign.
‘I was proud what we achieved with the championship because it wasn’t a well-funded team to start with and honestly we would not have finished the season if had not been for Martin Leach and NEXTEV having come in,’ says Piquet Jnr, referring to the popular late co-founder of the ambitious EV start-up.
Without doubt one of the key factors in unlocking the title potential for Piquet was Adrian Campos’ contacts at the Rational Motion engineering company based within the Toyota Motorsport GmbH building in Cologne.
It was Rational Motion that had a large art to play in China Racing’s turnaround from early season also rans to race inners at Long Beach a few races later.
‘We didn’t even know the concept of lift and coast in the first races,’ laughs Piquet Jnr. ‘It blows my mind that we went from that to winning the championship but a big change came when the Rational Motion guys came aboard for sure.’
‘Adrian (Campos) was the guy who believed in me and gave me a shot so I’ll always remember that and be thankful. The team too were really great and supportive after a tough start and it became a really big team after that when NEXTEV came in.’
For Piquet Jnr, whose career has seen many extremes, that first season of Formula E is one he not only savoured but also recalls as an encapsulation of the fickle motorsport world.
‘In this world if you do well people come and kiss your ass and if you are not you get forgotten about and that happened after a few bad seasons with me at NEXTEV, NIO and Jaguar too,’ he says.
‘But those things have happened and I didn’t become a bad driver overnight. The record books will show we beat everyone in the first season when it was even harder because everyone had the same machinery. So when I look back I have some really overriding special memories of that time.’
