'Just hanging on' - Jaguar's stumbling title defence

Jaguar was knocked off the top of both the drivers’ and teams’ world championship tables in the second Formula E round of 2024-25.

It’s not panicking about that or the fact it had a first non-score in 23 races at Mexico City.

But its confidence in making performance progress over the rest of the season needs to be well-founded if it is to remain in what is becoming a Porsche versus Nissan title fight.

Both Mitch Evans and Nick Cassidy initially made it through the group phases of Mexico qualifying, but Cassidy was subsequently sent to the rear of the field for a throttle map infraction, which also affected the two Envision Racing customer Jaguars of Sebastien Buemi and Robin Frijns.

That left Cassidy stuck in the midfield and only able to progress to 12th at a track that is notoriously hard for overtaking in Formula E, even with the all-wheel-drive element of the new Gen3Evo car.

It masked a raft of overnight improvements by Jaguar after a difficult first free practice session on the Friday evening prompted a long job list of changes ahead of the Saturday running.

It looked to have paid off as Cassidy made it into the duels with just one full 350kW lap in a strategy that was devised to save tyres for his race. Then the penalty meant it was all for nothing.

While praising Jaguar’s Friday-to-Saturday progress in Mexico, Cassidy also said “at the same time, I think honestly we're not as efficient as in the past. We've definitely fallen behind and it's making the races really tough.”

Evans crashed out of ninth place when he was caught unawares by Nico Mueller’s stuttering Andretti Porsche on the exit of the chicane.

When asked what he had learned from his Mexican weekend, Evans replied “we're not too good at the moment” and “we need to work on a lot of things”, admitting Jaguar is not a match for pacesetter Porsche right now.

“Porsche especially are just so strong everywhere, and we're just hanging on,” he said.

“We've got a bit of performance to find overall.

“It’s around the energy side, efficiency side, a little bit of one lap pace as well but that's probably the least of our worries.

“Overall, we just seemed a little off at the moment.”

Mexico was a comedown after Evans’s incredible last-to-first drive in the Sao Paulo opener, which looked like a potential Jaguar 1-2 before Cassidy was involved in the incident that sent Pascal Wehrlein’s Porsche flying. But that race was aided hugely by the timing of safety cars playing into Jaguar’s hands as its drivers still had an attack mode to take with the pack bunched up and could cruise past rivals.

Team principal James Barclay argued at the end of the Mexico weekend that  “we’re not sat here going ‘we have a car that has no performance’” and insisted Jaguar shouldn’t be judged too harshly.

“In fact, we have performance and what we just need to do is really bring that all together,” he said.

“If I look at the racing in Sao Paulo, we had both cars fighting potentially to be on the podium. So, let's put things into context, and that's what the team will be doing.

“We've had a really great race in Sao Paulo. We've come in at a tough race here, but there were some positive signs, particularly in qualifying.

“The job now is to go away and do it, and our first non-point scoring race in a long time is motivation to say, ‘we don't want to be back here', and that will be our job.”

Over the last two seasons Porsche and Jaguar have generally alternated in having the most competitive all-round package.

But with Nissan now stepping into that space and Jaguar seeming to have challenges in several areas, the eight week break in February, March and April looks like it will be crucial for Jaguar’s hopes of defending its teams’ and manufacturers’ titles.

“It's a long season, and historically, I think we have shown that we can evolve and develop,” Barclay rationalised.

“But there's no doubt that there's more dogs in this fight now and there's more horses in this race and that's what makes Formula E exciting.

“So, it's our job to try and get ahead of that curve and come out and come up on top.

“It's fair to say we've got some work to do, and the job now is to do that.

"But I think the potential is there to do the hard yards now and ahead of Jeddah close the gap.”

JAGUAR’S QUALIFYING PENALTIES EXPLAINED

Three of the four Jaguars - Cassidy and Envision pairing Buemi and Frijns - lost their Mexico qualifying times after the throttle pedal map was exceeded during their laps.

The general principle of the mapping exists to ensure that teams aren’t applying traction control, which is not overtly allowed in the regulations. There is a tolerance of the maps, which are often described colloquially as ‘buckets’ or ‘tunnels’ that are observed by the FIA.

Go out of those and a slam-dunk penalty is handed out immediately.

“The reality is we weren’t getting any performance gain,” said Barclay.

“Fundamentally we actually had a loss of performance with the wheel flare and the amount of torque that we had.

“So we have got to respect that and work with the FIA on it. But there is not a performance gain and as a team you have to really take that and move on.

“We have to work to make sure we are working better on that throttle map to make sure we are legal.

"We actually constantly make a decision to lose some performance to make sure we are aligned with that. But we just got it a bit wrong.”

The Race understands that the torque spike came at Turn 10 with the FIA determining the infraction almost immediately on the specific throttle maps which are officially homologated before the season begins.

Envision team boss Sylvain Filippi told The Race that he “didn’t want to blame them [Jaguar] because it wasn’t a mistake, it was just the way they mapped the cars”.