Rowland happy despite falling just short in Jeddah E-Prix race 1

Oliver Rowland says he was happy with his performance in the first race of the Jeddah E-Prix, despite losing the victory in the final few corners.

Rowland built up a sizable lead ahead of the Pit Boost fast-charging pit stops, but energy conservation, plus one less use of Attack Mode left him vulnerable to a charging Maximilian Guenther at the end, who finally found a way past at the Nissan driver at the Turn 14-15-16 chicane just before the checkered flag.

It meant the loss of what looked like a sure victory, but despite that, Rowland was able to see the positives.

“Of course, whenever you lose the victory in the last corner, it's a bit disappointing, but I think I'm pretty happy,” he conceded. “The car was good, we stuck to our strategy. I think it was a great race as a spectacle. I was able to push quite hard, had to be almost inch perfect every lap, and it came down to half a second.”

Rowland admitted that had he known how much of an energy advantage Guenther had over him, he might have approached the second half of the race differently, and perhaps not resorted to building such a gap earlier on.

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“We were first and second after the first lap, and the gap at the start was half a second, so of course it was a bit disappointing,” he said. “I'm a little bit frustrated that I didn't know how much of a buffer he had as he was coming back through, because I could have probably kept my target high enough to defend a bit better.

“I was actually trying to keep the gap at some point, and that hurt me a little bit at the end.

“We were struggling for energy and we have a point in which we have to lift in the last corner, otherwise we wouldn't make it to the line, and I had to lift. I was hoping that he did too, but he didn't."

Nevertheless, despite thinking of differing his approach in hindsight, Rowland said that he followed Nissan’s pre-race plan, but that the team expected others to pit late like he did.

“[The plan was] to do exactly what we did...” he said. “I think it was a way to stay quite safe and conservative in the first one, to stay a little bit out of the mess. It probably didn't go quite as we planned.

“We expected that a lot of people would do what we did, but it didn't seem that they did. I think we did everything right. I mean, we just lacked five hundredths of energy in the last corner, and that's it.”