Nick Cassidy has lost his fifth-place finish, incurring a post-race penalty for speeding under Full Course Yellow conditions in this morning’s Diriyah E-Prix.
The Kiwi put in a scintillating drive from tenth to fifth in only his second career Formula E race. It was a drive worthy of praise and would have given Cassidy a healthy dose of championship points.
However, Cassidy was one of eight drivers to be dished out with post-race penalties for several infringements.
The Envision Virgin driver was dealt a 24s time penalty in lieu of a drive-through for failing to slow sufficiently under the first FCY period when Jake Dennis was punted into the wall. Consequently, he drops to 14th in the race classification.
Still, Cassidy is taking away a number of positives from a successful race.
“I’m really happy after that race as we were definitely one of the strongest on track,” Cassidy said.
“At the end, I thought I had the two DS Techeetah cars covered and had the race been longer, I reckon we could have fought for a podium place. But of course, we had the full course yellow infringement.
“That said, I can take a lot of confidence from today, knowing that we had the pace to be on the front row and to be challenging for podiums is more than I expected from my first Formula E weekend.”
Tom Blomqvist and Rene Rast received similar penalties for the same fault.
Jean-Eric Vergne was demoted from third to 12th after failing to take the second of his attack mode deployments. DS Techeetah teammate Antonio Felix da Costa is thus elevated to the final podium spot.