A Difficult Day at the Office for NIO 333 Formula E Team in Monaco

It was a difficult day in the office for the NIO 333 Formula E Team at Round 7 of the 2021 ABB Formula E World Championship in Monaco.

The iconic circuit is laid out along the city streets of Monte Carlo and La Condamine which run around the harbour of the principality. Due to the narrow, tight, and twisty nature of the track good results in qualifying for a race here are crucial as there are few overtaking opportunities throughout the course.

Unfortunately, both NIO 333 FE Team drivers Tom Blomqvist and Oliver Turvey had issues on their qualifying laps preventing them from extracting maximum performance from their cars during the Group sessions and lined up for the 45 minutes plus 1 lap event on the penultimate row of the starting grid.

However, having made clean starts with evasive moves at the start of the Monaco E-Prix this afternoon, Tom made up several positions to take the chequered flag in P15, with Oliver crossing the line after a thrilling Formula E race in nineteenth.

Tom Blomqvist, NIO 333 FE 001 #88

Qualifying Group 4 - Race Grid Position: P21 Round 7 Race Result: provisional P15

“Challenging day – we didn’t have much pace so we need to understand why this was as we couldn’t have got much more out of our race today. We will use these weeks up until the Mexico E-Prix to analyse all the data and try to come up with solutions to improve our package. Let’s see what we can learn in this break and try to implement some solutions so that we are more consistently fighting for points.”

Oliver Turvey, NIO 333 FE 001 #8

Qualifying Group 3 - Race Grid Position: P22 Round 7 Race Result: provisional P19

“It was a tough day. In practice we were struggling to find a good feeling with the brakes, but I managed to put in a decent lap in FP2. Unfortunately, in qualifying the first half of my lap was good, but then I clipped the wall. The times were so close today that we ended up too far back on the grid to make much of an impression in the race. However, I did manage to get a decent start and made up a few positions in the first corners. I was then just unfortunate at the hairpin; going on the outside I got caught up with the incident ahead and that compromised the rest of my race. I did get in some good battles though, but it was a tough race to find a good rhythm. We need to understand why that was and come back stronger for the next race."

Christian Silk, NIO 333 FE Team Principal

“It is not the weekend we had hoped for when we came here. We struggled to get the most out of the cars in qualifying and, as we knew going into this race, qualifying is everything as it’s so difficult to overtake in Monaco. Having said that our race pace looked good; I think that we fell victim of where we qualified. The drivers did a good job, the team controlled the race well, but having qualified so far back it was always going to be very difficult to climb in to points scoring positions. We now have a few weeks back at base for the engineers to spend some time looking at the data from this weekend. We need to understand what happened in qualifying and come back stronger for the Mexico events.”

Rounds 8 and 9 of the 2021 ABB FIA Formula E Championship take place in Latin America at a new location for the all-electric series in Puebla, Mexico on 19th and 20th June.