Rowland salvages points despite Monaco E-Prix scuffle with Vergne

Oliver Rowland might not have completed a clean sweep of both Monaco E-Prix races, but he still left the event as the event’s highest scorer thanks to his second place finish in Sunday’s race which followed his pole position earlier in the day and victory in Saturday’s.

Despite the stellar performance over both days, the Nissan man didn’t come into the weekend with sky-high expectations following a difficult previous race in Miami.

“Honestly, I was content to score eight, 10 points ,” he said. “It’s more like just trying to consolidate a good double-header. You come here and you don’t know if your car is going to be competitive or not. Thankfully, it was. I got 25 points yesterday, I can add another 10 to it, that’s a super weekend.”

What cost Rowland two wins from two was his battle with Jean-Eric Vergne. The two entered the Nouvelle Chicane side-by-side on lap 19, with neither conceding in the fight. Rowland had to take to the kerb to avoid coming together, and the whole episode allowed Nyck de Vries (who was later re-passed by both) and Sebastien Buemi to get by.

Vergne took the last of his two Attack Modes before Rowland, and with Vergne’s Stellantis-powered DS Penske not as strong as Rowland’s Nissan, Rowland suspects the Frenchman was trying to back him into traffic so he’d suffer when he eventually went into the off-line activation zone to gain his mandatory uses of extra power and four-wheel-drive.

“He was kind of trying to slow the race down and back it up a little bit, so I was getting a little bit impatient,” Rowland said. “I think he knew that I was the only one that hadn’t done my Attack Mode, so he wanted to keep the pack quite close together.”

In terms of their pivotal moment at the Nouvelle Chicane, Rowland isn’t pointing any fingers.

“For me, it was pretty much wheel-to-wheel,” he said. “I would have been able to make the apex, but at the same time, it’s not easy to get two cars through there.”

Rowland later ceded the position he gained from his cut of the chicane, having tried to do it immediately after, only for it to not go to plan.

“From in the car, my initial reaction was to give it back straight away,” he said. “I had a decent amount of Attack left and I didn’t want to risk getting at the end of the race, in case there’s a safety car or something like that.

“When I came out of the corner, I looked in my mirrors. It was just full of cars. I tried a little bit, I lifted, but I just said, ‘No, it’s gonna get really messy if I end up giving it back.’

“For me, it’s kind of a racing incident, but I also get both sides.”

Vergne agreed, telling RACER, “It’s racing as usual.

“We’re racing, we’re racing to the limit and things like this happen,” he said. “I did nothing wrong. He cut the chicane; it’s not like he wanted to take me out. I saved my position, and I’ve got nothing to say.”

Vergne also said it wasn’t the battle with Rowland that cost him a win, or certainly a podium, but the safety car that came out when Nico Mueller crashed at Massenet.

“We wanted to be safe from the beginning and be at the forefront for the race, so we took an aggressive setup which worked out nice,” he said. “I knew there was not going to be more rain so I needed to create a big gap, which I did – I had more than 3s on P2, and to P4 I had a 10-15s gap, so my podium position was kind of secured, and then they brought the safety car out of nowhere.”

Vergne queried the need for the safety car, comparing it to Antonio Felix da Costa’s crash on Saturday which only brought out a full course yellow, despite him suggesting that in comparison, Mueller’s stricken car posed less of a risk.

“Frankly, I don’t understand at all because when you look at yesterday’s race, Antonio was in the middle of the track — it’s dangerous, and they bring out the full course yellow,” he said. “And now, for such a little incident? The car was parked at an exit, they just had to pull it in, and they brought out a safety car. It doesn’t make any sense to me. The safety car really ruined my race.