Pascal Wehrlein seized the Formula E championship lead with a dominant Race 1 win, before Antonio Felix da Costa answered with a strategic masterpiece in Race 2.
The Jeddah Corniche Circuit hosted one of Season 12’s most compelling weekends, delivering two races of entirely different characters under the Saudi Arabian night sky. From a championship perspective, Porsche arrived flying and left with a bruise on one side of the garage. Jaguar, meanwhile, looked well and truly back in contention after a miserable opening pair of races. And somewhere in the middle of it all, a rookie apologised to the world, and two teammates nearly took each other out on the last lap.
Race 1
Pascal Wehrlein’s first victory in ten months couldn’t have been better timed. Not only did Friday’s Race 1 represent his 100th Formula E start, it was also the championship’s debut of the new single Attack Mode with Pit Boost format, a tweak designed to simplify the strategic picture for viewers at home and deliver more decisive racing. Wehrlein proceeded to give a masterclass in exactly how to exploit it.
The German executed a perfect strategy to come through and take a commanding win by over two-and-a-half seconds from pole-sitter Edoardo Mortara, with Mitch Evans third and Nico Mueller fourth in the second Porsche.
The race began in chaos. Nyck de Vries’ Mahindra suffered what was believed to be an inverter failure before a wheel turned in anger, leaving him stationary on the grid and triggering a delayed start. When the lights finally went out, Edoardo Mortara, sitting on pole, spun his wheels badly enough to drop from first to seventh within the opening complex, getting swallowed up in a barging match with Norman Nato’s Nissan. Maximilian Guenther gladly accepted the invitation to lead.
From there, Wehrlein played the long game. He moved through to second behind Guenther, then bided his time until the Pit Boost window opened. The timing of his fast-charge stop and his decision to save his single Attack Mode deployment for after the pit stop proved decisive. He rejoined the circuit in clear air, activated the 50kW all-wheel-drive boost, and simply drove away from the field.
Wehrlein sealed the victory by timing his Pit Boost and Attack Mode just right to head home Mahindra’s Edoardo Mortara and Jaguar’s Mitch Evans. By the time the pitstop sequence had played out, Wehrlein led by over seven seconds. It was, in the parlance of the sport, a walk in the park.
Mortara, to his enormous credit, recovered superbly from that dreadful start. Using a late Attack Mode activation to surge through a pack of drivers who had already burned theirs, he sliced up to second place, his Mahindra handling the new rolling average power rule with notable elegance compared to some rivals. But even with fresh Attack Mode energy, he could only close to within three seconds of the leader.
Mitch Evans made it a Jaguar double points finish with third, while Guenther and Nato, who had both activated Attack Mode early before their pitstops, fell all the way to 11th and 13th respectively.
The win handed Wehrlein 26 points, including fastest lap, vaulted him to the top of the championship standings, and gave Porsche their best-ever start to a Formula E season.
Race 2
If Friday was a procession, Saturday was a proper street fight, and it ended with da Costa delivering one of the cleanest, most composed wins of his career.
Jaguar’s Antonio Felix da Costa pulled off a strategic masterclass to win the second leg of the Jeddah E-Prix, ending a victory drought stretching back to the 2024 Portland E-Prix. With no Pit Boost available in Race 2, the opening stages turned into an energy conservation game, with Mortara, Buemi, Rowland and da Costa all swapping the lead. Around lap nine, Mortara turned up the wick and stormed to the front. But the Swiss driver’s decision on how to deploy his eight-minute Attack Mode allocation ultimately cost him.
Da Costa, meanwhile, was patient. He timed his first Attack Mode to perfection, and with the additional 50kW of power, stormed to the front and snatched the lead on lap 21. Mimicking Wehrlein’s Race 1 approach with eerie precision, he built a buffer and never looked back. His 13th career win was also his first with Jaguar, completing a curious personal statistic. He had previously waited exactly five races before winning with DS Techeetah in 2019 and with Porsche in 2023. Five races into his Jaguar chapter, history repeated itself.
Da Costa crossed the line 2.574 seconds ahead of Sebastien Buemi, who fended off Oliver Rowland’s late charge by just 0.934 seconds to claim his first podium of the season.
Rowland’s presence on the podium was itself a remarkable story. The reigning champion had endured a miserable Friday, qualifying sluggishly and finishing 17th, but his team overhauled the car overnight, changing essentially all the hardware permitted by the regulations. He rewarded their efforts with a front-row start and third place.
Teammates on the Edge
Cupra Kiro had an encouraging Saturday on balance; both Dan Ticktum and Pepe Marti finished in the top six for their best team result of the season. But the closing laps nearly undid all of that goodwill.
With the race winding down, Marti launched an ambitious lunge on Ticktum through the chicane. The two made contact. Both survived and held their positions, fifth and sixth, but the incident triggered an expletive-filled radio exchange and, more seriously, a deeply unfortunate choice of words from Marti over team comms.
“I may be a rookie, but I’m not a retard. That is a retard move,” the Spaniard told his engineer, using the offensive slur twice in quick succession. To his credit, Marti apologised immediately, both on the radio and then again publicly after the race: “I would also like to deeply apologise for the language I used on the radio today. I chose my words terribly. Unfortunately, I cannot take back my words, but I want to publicly express my deepest apologies for my behaviour.”
Team principal Russell O’Hagan added that Marti held himself to higher standards and made clear it would not happen again. Ticktum, for his part, said he “had a pop” at his teammate but considered it “water under the bridge” within the hour. On the incident itself, Ticktum felt it was “a bit over the line”, given how late a move it was, into a tight chicane, on the dirty part of the track.
The incident raised wider questions about Kiro’s communication and resource depth. O’Hagan was candid, acknowledging that the team simply hadn’t managed the situation well enough. “The buck stops with me; we’ve got to make sure that can never even get close to happening again,” he said. For a team clearly punching above its weight in terms of raw performance, these operational lapses could prove costly over a long season.
Mahindra
The most bittersweet garage in the paddock over the Jeddah weekend belonged to Mahindra. On one side, Edoardo Mortara delivered arguably the most polished driving display of the entire weekend across both qualifying sessions and races, claiming back-to-back pole positions and 21 championship points. He now sits second in the standings, and his Mahindra appears genuinely adapted to the 2026 regulations in a way that several rivals are not.
On the other side of the garage, Nyck de Vries endured what team boss Frederic Bertrand diplomatically described as a “tough beginning of season.” The 2021 champion’s Race 1 was ended before it began by a suspected inverter failure on the grid. The subsequent hardware replacements meant a 60-place grid penalty for Race 2, and without a safety car to bunch the field, de Vries was left driving around in near-isolation at the back.
He now sits 50 points behind Mortara in the standings. Whether Mahindra can arrest that slide before the gap becomes insurmountable will be one of the season’s subplots worth watching.
Porsche
For Porsche, Jeddah was a study in contrasts. Friday was arguably their best single-race performance since their title-winning 2024 campaign, with Wehrlein’s demolition job producing 38 combined points from the two cars. Their overall haul through four races, 109 points, was the best start to a season in the German manufacturer’s history in Formula E.
Then came Saturday.
Wehrlein, who had looked untouchable 24 hours earlier, struggled throughout with grip and never found the pace that had made him look like a different class of driver. He finished eighth. Nico Mueller, starting 16th, gambled on an ultra-energy-saving strategy in hopes of a late safety car that never came, finishing 16th again and losing his perfect 100% points-scoring record in the process.
It was a useful reminder that Formula E’s format can produce wildly different results from the same car on consecutive days. The team leads the manufacturers’ standings by a healthy margin, but Saturday showed the chasing pack exactly where the vulnerabilities lie.
Stellantis’ problems continue
If Porsche’s Saturday was troubling, the DS Penske and Citroen situation is developing into something more persistent. Across both races, the four Stellantis-powered cars scored just 16 combined points.
Maximilian Guenther had the raw pace to challenge for victories in Race 1 but was let down by strategy. Taylor Barnard spoke openly about baffling inconsistency in his car’s handling, describing a fundamental imbalance between left and right corners that his team could not resolve despite extensive tyre screening programmes.
Nick Cassidy, who had led the championship after three races, scored only eight points over the Jeddah weekend and slipped to fourth in the standings. Jean-Eric Vergne picked up peripheral points finishes in eighth and ninth, solid but far from what the double champion will have expected heading into a double-header at a circuit that has suited the Stellantis package in previous seasons.
Citroen team principal Cyril Blais acknowledged that the team simply wasn’t able to find the right position in the pack to manage energy efficiently. “We were surprised by the pace of the race at the beginning,” he said. “We were in the no-man’s land, where we don’t want to be.”
Championship Standings after Jeddah
Pascal Wehrlein’s commanding win in Race 1 propelled him to the top of the Formula E drivers’ standings, while Antonio Felix da Costa’s strategic victory in Race 2 vaulted him to seventh. Edoardo Mortara grabbed back-to-back poles and a runner-up finish in Race 1, promoting him to second in the rankings, with Oliver Rowland lurking third after his Race 2 podium salvaged a weekend that had been marred by 17th in the opener.
In the teams’ standings, Porsche leads by a comfortable margin, with Jaguar now second after their extraordinary turnaround from the bottom of the standings after the opening two races.
Looking ahead
Away from the racing, the Jeddah paddock was alive with broader championship conversations. Formula E CEO Jeff Dodds indicated that the longer version of the Jeddah Corniche circuit, capable of speeds well in excess of 200mph for the upcoming Gen4 car, could be considered for next season’s calendar. He was also relaxed about the venue’s long-term future, whether that means continuing to share the city with Formula 1 or eventually relocating within Saudi Arabia.
More pressingly, there are growing concerns about whether Japan will remain on the calendar beyond this summer’s Tokyo races. With a new deal needed for the Big Sight venue in the Ariake district and question marks over whether the site suits the Gen4 regulations, Nissan team principal Tommaso Volpe was measured but candid: “It would be very bad,” he said, given that Nissan is the only Japanese manufacturer in the series.
On the commercial side, the new multi-year agreement between Formula E Operations and the teams is reportedly close to finalisation. A special media launch event for the Gen4 machine is planned for late April, where all manufacturers will be present with their development cars.
Race Results Summary
Race 1 (Round 4)
- Pascal Wehrlein (Porsche)
- Edoardo Mortara (Mahindra)
- Mitch Evans (Jaguar)
- Nico Mueller (Porsche)
- Antonio Felix da Costa (Jaguar)
- Nick Cassidy (Citroen)
- Sebastien Buemi (Envision)
- Jean-Eric Vergne (Citroen)
- Jake Dennis (Andretti)
- Taylor Barnard (DS Penske)
Race 2 (Round 5)
- Antonio Felix da Costa (Jaguar)
- Sebastien Buemi (Envision)
- Oliver Rowland (Nissan)
- Edoardo Mortara (Mahindra)
- Dan Ticktum (Kiro)
- Pepe Marti (Kiro)
- Mitch Evans (Jaguar)
- Pascal Wehrlein (Porsche)
- Jean-Eric Vergne (Citroen)
- Taylor Barnard (DS Penske)
Formula E season 12 continues with the Madrid ePrix on the 21st March 2026
