Andrew Ferraro/Motorsport Images
Early Jeddah E-Prix battles may have cost Barnard victory
Taylor Barnard felt a win could have been on the cards for him in the first race of the Jeddah E-Prix had he not had to fight other cars earlier in the race.
The NEOM McLaren driver closed right up to the lead duo of Maximilian Guenther and Oliver Rowland by the last lap, but that came after battles with Nyck de Vries and Jake Hughes kept his hands full earlier in the race.
“I made a mistake by letting Nyck past on lap 10 or so, and then Jake got past as well, which hindered my race a little bit,” Barnard lamented. “I over-consumed to try and catch him, and I saw the timer on my steering wheel, and I knew I had only 15s (of Attack Mode) left, so I had one chance. I made it very aggressive.
“With how close I was on the last couple of laps, for sure a win was possible, but Oli was defending very well. And when you're the third guy, to try and make some kind of move on people, it’s very difficult, especially around here.
“It's all if, buts and maybes, but I think ... we did a good race as a team and we're looking forward to tomorrow.”
Unlike Rowland, who was among the last drivers to pit, Barnard was one of the first. Despite the vastly contrasting strategies, both finished on par with one another, but Barnard admitted that pitting behind the Maserati of Hughes could have potentially cost him a chance to leapfrog the Nissan driver.
“It was part of the plan from the beginning,” Barnard said of his early stop. “I think we executed everything very well. I lost a bit of time, but I don't know if that's because I entered behind the Maserati and I lost a little bit of time behind him. I still need to analyze the rates and everything properly.”
Dominik Wilde
Dominik often jokes that he was born in the wrong country – a lover of NASCAR and IndyCar, he covered both in a past life as a junior at Autosport in the UK, but he’s spent most of his career to date covering the sliding and flying antics of the U.S.’ interpretation of rallycross. Rather fitting for a man that says he likes “seeing cars do what they’re not supposed to do”, previously worked for a car stunt show, and once even rolled a rally car with Travis Pastrana. He was also comprehensively beaten in a kart race by Sebastien Loeb once, but who hasn’t been?
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