'I can't even remember' the last win - Buemi ends drought in Monaco

Ending droughts seemed to be a recurring theme during the Monaco E-Prix weekend, but none had lasted as long as Sebastien Buemi’s winless run.

After more than five years, the streak snapped. It was the Envision Racing driver’s third on the streets of Monaco, but his first on the full grand prix layout, leading to him describing it as “like a first — I can’t even remember the other two, years ago.”

His most recent win in the series, the first race of the New York City double-header at the end of the 2018-19 season, was also a faded memory, such has been the gap since then.

“It’s been a long time; I can’t even remember the last time in New York,” he said. “You need everything to align properly in these kind of races: the Attack Mode, when you fight, when you overtake. I guess today, everything aligned properly.”

Properly aligned indeed. A perfectly-timed final Attack Mode gave him not just the power to pounce when Oliver Rowland and Jean Eric Vergne’s fight at the front boiled over, but build an unassailable lead afterward, too, as the wet track started to dry up.

“I think I was just able to pass Oli, de Vries and JEV quite quickly, and then I was able to make a big gap at the end with the Attack Mode,” he said. “I think that was the key, because every straight you spend behind the car that is not in Attack Mode, you waste a lot of lap time.

“You need a good car, and you need to make the right decisions, clearly. At the end, it was drying up quite a lot, so you have to be kind of clever with where to put the power , because you could start to see the line drying up. There was quite a lot of lap time if you were to have the confidence to attack in those corners, but the last 10 laps I was just hoping for no crashes from anyone, no safety cars. I was lucky with that.”

As one of Formula E’s elder statesmen, questions are starting to creep in about how long Buemi has left in the series. While he admits he’s had his doubts about himself in recent seasons, particularly as he’s struggled to get to grips with the GEN3 car, he insists he’s not lost his desire to compete in Formula E.

“You’re a competitor. You go again and again, but of course, at some point you doubt yourself,” he admitted. “You think, ‘I can’t do it.’ I was teammates with those two guys (Rowland at Nissan, Cassidy previously at Envision), and at some point they were a lot better than me.

“So you’ve got to work out. If you keep pushing, at some point you try to learn from your mistakes and get better. I think that that car never suited my style very much, but, you know, I’m trying to develop still.”