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Lady Luck pays a visit to Tokyo and helps Vandoorne nail strategy gamble
Luck is often a key factor in any motor race, but that was never more the case than in Stoffel Vandoorne’s victory in the first race of the Tokyo E-Prix.
Gambling on a likely safety car or red flag, the Maserati MSG driver spent the early safety car laps – the race starting that way due to the wet conditions – burning up energy to get his battery level into the Pit Boost window early on so he could get his stop out of the way and wait for the anticipated interruption and cycle to the front.
Vandoorne pitted on lap 10, then on lap 13 the race was red flagged when Maximilian Guenther stopped on track. The Belgian had pitted, but effectively lost no time, being right on the tail of the pack when the race resumed.
“We discussed it beforehand, before the race,” Vandoorne said of the gamble that turned out to be a masterstroke. “Actually, I'm a little bit surprised that not many more people gambled that way.
“We probably took it to the very extreme. That's kind of what you have to do if you try and gamble – just do it properly. That's what we did today.
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“I knew what I had to do to make it work, and I knew as soon as the red flag came in what position I was going to be.”
Everything came together perfectly for Vandoorne, but he concedes it required a lot of management from him and his team to maximize everything.
“Definitely not going to lie, today was very particular,” he said. “We executed a plan that was difficult to manage, but we executed well, having to burn a lot of energy in the beginning to open the pit window very early.
“I knew in the position I was [in] there was a lot to manage. A lot of communication between myself and my engineer, Thibault [Arnal], but he kept it calm, and we managed to bring it home. [I’m] just very happy that our plan actually paid off.”
The win was Vandoorne’s first in Maserati colors, his first for 49 races, and Maserati’s first since the inaugural Tokyo E-Prix last season.
“Obviously everyone is super happy,” Vandoorne said. “We deserve it as well, because we've had a couple of races where we've had some bad luck, so this time we had a little bit of good luck.
“It’s Formula E – sometimes it's your day, sometimes it's not. Today we all deserve this victory.”
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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