Season 9 Formula E champion Jake Dennis is coming into this campaign rejuvenated after losing his crown last season, according to Andretti team principal Roger Griffiths, and his driver agrees he’s coming in with a better mindset.
While Dennis was a race winner and further three-time podium finisher in 2023-24, his form fell away towards the second half of the year as he finished seventh in the standings. Ahead of Season 11, the Briton admits there were things he could have done better, but that he didn’t feel like competing as the reigning champion put him under any particular pressure.
“I personally felt like my motivation last year was high,” Dennis told RACER. “I was not particularly lazy, but I also didn’t quite look into driving techniques to my absolute best. The motivation was there to succeed, we had an incredible first half of the year, and it also died off towards the end.
“Last year, I literally felt no pressure in terms of having the No. 1 on my car. And actually, (I was) maybe probably more relaxed, just purely because I felt like I’d achieved — I’d shown everyone what I can do. And I still have that to my name now, I’m still a world champion, so from my side, it doesn’t change all that much. It is just a sticker, right? At the end of the day, I’m driving the race car as fast as I possibly can.
“From my side, I just want to win races, podiums, and that’s generally enough to wrap up the championship. It’s good to be back in the car. It’s been a long time since London, where we didn’t do too well, and it’s good to show I can still drive.”
At the four-day pre-season test in Jarama this week, Griffiths says that he’s already seen Dennis in “a much better place.”
“I don’t think Jake personally had his best year last year, and I think he’d be the first to admit to that,” Griffiths said. “He seems to have come here with a much more focused mindset. Last year, when he had No. 1 on the car, he had the target on his back immediately. I think now that he’s back to No. 27 the pressure is off a little bit. From that perspective, you can just stay focused on what it is he does well, which is driving fast.
“I think there were a lot of distractions last year, and I think he’s in a much better place — we’re already seeing that. The focus is there, the detail is there, the preciseness is there.”
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Porsche customer Andretti ultimately didn’t feature in the championship equation towards the end of last season — which ended up being a straight fight between the factory Porsche team and Jaguar TCS Racing — but rather than a slump in the team’s own performance, Griffiths feels that it was more indicative of the Formula E field as a whole improving in what was the second season of the GEN3 formula.
“I don’t think we did anything fundamentally wrong last year,” he said. “I think what we saw was an increased level of competitiveness, particularly from the manufacturer teams. Maybe that was some of the challenges for the manufacturers in developing a car, working with a customer, whereas we had the luxury of just focusing on performance. They were having to do all of the stuff, plus trying to focus on performance.
“At the end of the day, if you look at where the championship standings ended up, we were the best of the non-manufacturer teams. We were the only non-manufacturer team to get a race win.
“There are things that we could have done better, I should say. I think there was a few procedural things that we really tightened up on and you’ve seen that coming already. Formula E now is so competitive, it is not that magic silver bullet to fix everything. It’s just the attention to detail, and it only takes a little bit.”