Mahindra breaks podium drought in Monaco with a little luck

It’s been 840 days since a Mahindra driver last stood on the podium in Formula E. For Nyck de Vries, that gap is 167 days longer, but finally both streaks came to a jubilant end in Monaco on Saturday.

De Vries drove his Mahindra M11Electro to second place in the first race of the Monaco E-Prix, capping off a fine day for the team which saw the Dutchman start fourth on the grid – the same position in which his teammate Edoardo Mortara finished the race.

“It sounds like a while ago – well, it is a while – luckily I still knew the way to the grid from the F2 days,” said de Vries, a two-time winner in Monaco in Formula 2, alluding to Monaco’s unique podium setup on the start/finish straight. “It’s been an incredible day for us as a team, all the way through practice, qualifying, and the team did a phenomenal job during the race, making the right calls at the right time around the Boost charge period and choosing the Attack Modes, so a lot of credit to them. very happy to be able to give them some reward for all the work that has been done in the past one and a half years.”

The podium finish, while the first in a while, isn’t much of a shock. It hasn’t been a case of if it would happen this season, but when, with the team having undergone a much-talked about rebuild. But while the podium has been coming, de Vries admits that it won’t make the next challenge any easier.

“We are showing that we’re making those steps continuously, and obviously the next steps are going to be even harder,” he said. “We’re very, very happy, and especially to do it here in Monaco, in front of friends and family. It’s nice to be back.”

Team principal Fred Bertrand added that the result shows the Indian manufacturer is now capable of competing with the likes of Porsche, Nissan and Jaguar who’ve often been at the front during the GEN3 era and whose powertrains have taken all but four wins during the ruleset’s lifespan so far. Efficiency has been a key part of that improvement, with it often being the deciding factor in races as drivers hold off from engaging in on-track battles until the latter stages to maximize their energy usage.

“Finally we’re seeing that, because the car has made a big step, we are now playing a bit more in the upper-level of the field than we were before,” he said. “That gives confidence.

“At the moment you don’t end up fighting all the time, you consume so much less than if you are fighting.”

That being said, Monaco has been a monkey on the team’s back for the last few years. It hasn’t scored there in the last two campaigns, and hasn’t had a podium there since the 2016-17 season. Despite knowing it had made overall gains, there were doubts heading into the weekend.

“We were not sure if we would be competitive,” Bertrand admits. “But we came very well prepared, because from FP1 we were there, and that makes a big change in the way you prepare your day. Particularly because the sessions are so close, you have no time to modify so much so you have to deliver.”

The result comes after the team was caught out twice with Mortara in Miami, with his Attack Mode deployments coinciding with a safety car and a red flag period, meaning one was wasted and the other wasn’t fully used before the race ended. The first race in Monaco could have provided a similar dilemma, with the race being neutralized on two occasions, but with the interruptions being full course yellows rather than outright stoppages, there was minimal impact this time around.

“In our case, it was not a big impact,” Bertrand said. “We were impacted a lot in Miami — the first time was a safety car, and the second was the red — so that had a big impact at that moment, but not this time.”

Bertrand also admitted Monaco wasn’t down to lessons learned from Miami, but rather a stroke of luck:

“Sometimes is activated and something is happening at that moment, but I would be very, very enthusiastic if we planned it.”