General
Felix da Costa: 'The Halo saved my life today'
- Ludo van Denderen
Behind the garages, the traces of a day earlier were still clearly visible. Broken rims, cracked chassis; it looked like a car graveyard behind the pit boxes. The huge crash involving half the field in Formula E during the first ePrix of Rome this weekend meant that several badly damaged cars had to be completely rebuilt during the night. Miraculously, all 22 cars were intact by the start of the third free practice session.
It was a lot of work for several teams. Mechanics sat exhausted in their garages on Sunday morning. At Jaguar, for example, the team that had in Sam Bird unintentionally being the instigator of the massive chaos a day earlier. It was the Brit who hit a draining, then bounced into the wall, only to be hit hard by a number of competitors. Sebastien Buemi (Envision), Edoardo Mortara (Maserati) and Antonio Felix da Costa (Porsche) - along with Bird - suffered the most damage as a result.
'Most anxious moment of my life'
Afterwards, everyone was lucky that there were no injuries (or worse) to mourn. "The Halo saved my life today, I'm 100 per cent sure of that," said Felix da Costa. "That was the most anxious moment in my life."
Whereas free practice for a second race of the weekend is normally used to fine-tune the cars' setup, most teams used the session mainly to see if everything was working again. For Sam Bird and Sacha Fenestraz, not everything was yet working as hoped, and they spent a long time in their garages. Bird finally clocked a time in the closing stages. The best man on Sunday morning was (again) Mitch Evans. Saturday's winner was a tenth quicker than Buemi.
