Antonio Felix da Costa wins Formula E season-opener in Saudi Arabia to hand BMW ‘perfect start’

BMW were handed the ‘perfect start’ by Antonio Felix da Costa to their debut ABB FIA Formula E Championship campaign as the Portuguese driver admitted to feeling the emotion from his E-Prix win after four years of hurt.

The 27-year-old has been in Formula E since Season 1 and won the fourth ever Formula E race in Buenos Aires back in January 2015 but has yet to even make a podium since that point 41 races later.

Da Costa moved from Team Aguri to the Andretti team in 2016 in the knowledge BMW would be taking over the team in Season 5 to form the current BMW i Andretti Motorsport team. And his patience looks to have been rewarded, with the new German manufacturer sending an early warning to rivals Audi, Jaguar, Nissan and DS Automobiles.

After looking the fastest team in pre-season testing at Valencia the German car giant proved this was no fluke as da Costa took pole position on a heavily rain-affected day in Ad Diriyah and produced a fierce drive to take the chequered flag.

Da Costa used both the new Attack Mode and FAN BOOST to keep reigning champion Jean-Eric Vergne, who had suffered an early drive-through penalty, at bay and then thrillingly survived a last-ditch overtake from the Frenchman to win.

“I’m a little bit Latin so I’m very emotional so I’m just so happy with [the win],” he said. “When I crossed the line I was happy obviously but I was just assimilating everything. It was when I saw everyone’s faces and felt all the emotion from the rest of the guys that it all really came to me.

“It is a perfect start. No one can relax now and think this is it, we’ve got it. There is a lot of hard work to put in now if we want to stay here so it is going to be a very long year. I’m not really thinking about the Championship, we’ll win some, we’ll lose some and we’ll see where we are at the end of the year.”

While the race saw a new car, a new location and a new race format, the opener to Season 5 of the ABB FIA Formula E Championship was just as incident-packed as ever with crashes, overtakes and some very unexpected rain causing chaos in the desert.

With Free Practice 1 and 2 both cancelled and qualifying heavily impacted by a downpour the effects were felt throughout the day as eight separate drivers were given penalties across qualification and the race due to technical mistakes not ironed out earlier in the day.

One of the drivers to suffer from this was reigning champ Vergne who looked to have picked up from where he left off last year as he took the lead, only to be given a drive through penalty moments later.

However, with the help of the hugely effective Attack Mode, the Frenchman managed to regain second place with Geox Dragon Racing’s Jerome D’Ambrosio in third - holding of the advancing Panasonic Jaguar Racing driver Mitch Evans for a podium position.

Felipe Massa, who also got a drive-through penalty, finished 17th on his Formula E debut while ex-McLaren Stoffel Vandoorne finished 16th