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Rowland to the fore as Tokyo FP2 washes out
Oliver Rowland kept Nissan on top during second practice for the Tokyo E-Prix as heavy rain turned the circuit from race track into river, catching out most of the field.
The championship leader's best time of 1m32.525s was 0.687s quicker than Mahindra’s Edoardo Mortara in second, while Rowland’s teammate Norman Nato was third, a further 0.276s back, maintaining the home team's strong start to the weekend.
Taylor Barnard was a fine fourth for NEOM McLaren, recovering from his heavy crash in FP1, ensuring that three of the four Nissan-powered cars were in the top four, while Nyck de Vries finished fifth in the second Mahindra, despite a coming together with Lola Yamaha Abt's Zane Maloney just before the first red flag of the session.
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The first of two red flags came in the final 10 minutes as David Beckmann slid off at Turn 15. While the session was resumed with three minutes to go, it was brought to a premature close after Maloney hit the wall at Turn 16, coming to a stop at Turn 17 with broken right rear suspension.
Envision Racing’s Sebastien Buemi wound up sixth, ahead of Dan Ticktum and Jean-Eric Vergne, who was another driver to brush the Turn 16 wall. His DS Penske teammate Maximilian Guenther was ninth after a late push moved him up the order, with Robin Frijns rounding out the top 10 in the second Envision.
Antonio Felix da Costa was the highest-ranking Porsche-powered driver, coming in 11th for the TAG Heuer factory team, ahead of Sam Bird, Nick Cassidy, and Stoffel Vandoorne, with Jake Hughes 15th ahead of Maloney, Pascal Wehrlein in the other TAG Heuer Porsche, Lucas di Grassi, Mitch Evans, and Beckmann. The Andretti duo of Nico Mueller and Jake Dennis completed the field.
Aside from Evans, all drivers from 15th down to 22nd completed their best laps on 300kW and rear-wheel drive, the rest of the field utilizing the 350kW Attack Mode with four-wheel-drive for their best laps.
As well as lap times, lap counts were also down on account of the weather and the stoppages, with Rowland and Guenther registering the most at 20, four down from Friday's highest total.
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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