“How the turntables” – famous words spoken by Steve Carell’s Michael Scott once upon a time, but in the case of the 2023 Extreme E Island X Prix, poignant words, too.
A year ago the series ran its first-ever doubleheader event on the Italian island. The first round of the weekend was won on the road by Rosberg X Racing, only for a penalty to snatch that victory away and hand it to Chip Ganassi Racing. A year later, we saw something of a repeat, albeit with the tables turned – Ganassi were the winners on the road, but RXR were declared the winners.
It was a dominant display by GMC Hummer EV Chip Ganassi Racing’s new-for-2023 lineup of RJ Anderson and Amanda Sorensen. The duo have been gaining speed with each session they’ve contested this year, culminating in a maiden podium at the Hydro X Prix in Scotland last time out. This time, in Sardinia, the site of the team’s first win one year ago (with previous drivers Kyle LeDuc and Sara Price), the team was all set to make yet another step and claim that first win of the year.
After a skirmish off the start with Andretti Altawkilat’s Timmy Hansen and RXR’s Johan Kristoffersson, Anderson blasted into an early lead, handing a clean car and a comfortable advantage to teammate Amanda Sorensen, who maintained that advantage for the second half of the race.
However…
The team left the driver switch area a fraction of a second before the mandatory 45s, resulting in a 15.7s penalty for the team – 15 seconds as punishment, plus whatever advantage they were deemed to have gained.
The penalty — a cruel twist to what had been a fantastic culmination of this fresh pairing’s progress over the year — instantly drew comparisons to the same race one year ago, where it was Ganassi that benefitted from RXR’s own misfortune on that occasion.
The irony wasn’t lost on Kristofferson.
“I think I crossed the finish line first in every race in Sardinia. Now we didn’t cross the finish line first,” he told RACER with a smile, having been declared winner alongside teammate Mikaela Ahlin-Kottulinsky after crossing the finish line in second.
“That’s the thing — you have to be precise on these things and if you want to gamble with them a bit… But you don’t want to be too safe on the safe side. But if you’re on the other side you get this penalty, so it’s about getting all those pieces together, making everything right, and being quick,” she added.
For the Ganassi duo, as painful as the lost victory was, both Anderson and Sorensen were quick to point out the obvious positives.
“Well it’s obviously a tough one but I think it shows that at least we have good pace,” said Anderson. “We’ve been slowly getting faster through the year – it’s a bummer. We’ve been working hard, obviously, so … to cross the line first and get put back, it’s still a podium, still a step in the right direction. We’re just trying to do all the little things right. It’s Extreme E — anything can happen out here so to be consistently now running up front with the fast guys, it’s still our first year, we’re learning, hopefully that luck comes around another time where we catch the good break.
“It’s a podium, two back-to-back podiums, it’s good for our team and we’ll get back to work for round six.”
Sorensen added: “RJ held it down from the beginning. It looked really tough and I gave him pep talk. I said, ‘Don’t lift, because I didn’t lift so you can’t lift,’ and our plan worked. He gave me a good clean car, right out front. I got in the car and I knew the pressure was on considering Catie (Munnings) had a small gap on me. I just had to not make any mistakes. The track was definitely unpredictable, super-slick out there, and kind of bummed we were in third.
“There’s always tomorrow and it’s definitely a learning curve for the team, but it is what it is and we’ll get them tomorrow.”
While it’s easy to paint the picture of one team inheriting another’s well-deserved victory, that would be doing a disservice to RXR who, after the first turn on the first lap, didn’t even look like finishing, let alone winning.
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“I don’t think anybody expected that,” remarked Ahlin-Kottulinsky.
That contact between Ganassi, RXR, and the Andretti entry resulted in Kristoffersson being fired way off-line and coming to a complete stop.
“I didn’t have a good start,” he admitted. “The start line was really wet gravel so the takeoff wasn’t very good, so I was like one and a half meters behind Acciona (Sainz) and Abt (Cupra), but then Mattias (Ekstrom) dropped back, and then I was a bit too wide and hit a bump and got even further wide on the exit of Turn 1.
“I had a very, very hard hit under the car so I thought maybe the car will be broken, so I came to an absolute stop after a while – I wasn’t sure if there were any stones or stuff in the bushes.”
Kristoffersson was seconds away from giving up, but he said, “We felt we had nothing to lose,” so he got the team back on track – literally. The water on track, laid down before the final, gave them hope too.
“Then I thought, ‘I might as well try and go,’ just before I unbuckled the seatbelts and jumped out. And then I started driving and the conditions were very different and very tricky and I think that helped a lot coming from the back. I had nothing to lose and I drove as fast as I could.
“Obviously it was quite tricky when I caught Loeb with the puncture, tried to pass him in a safe way and then at the end of the second lap I managed to get past Mattias, so that was a good run, and then caught right up behind Timmy into the switch and left the car to Mikaela.”
After picking off those in front one-by-one, Ahlin-Kottulinsky was left to continue the hunt, aided by Kristoffersson’s knowledge gained through the first half of the race.
“He (Kristoffersson) was really finding the right lines, able to test different lines, found really good ones and in the switch, gave me that information… I said, ‘Copy,’ and did what he told me to do,” Ahlin-Kottulinsky said. “That is the key of the championship — it’s about teamwork between the drivers and obviously the whole team and they gave me really good information.
Before long Ahlin-Kottulinsky was shadowing Andretti’s Catie Munnings, who was running in second place, and while she was able to get by the Brit, contact between the two did pitch Munnings into a roll.
“First of all, I’m happy that Catie is okay,” Ahlin-Kottulinsky said. “In the driving, I did what Johan told me to do and I felt that I had good pace, and…then the opportunity was there to overtake Catie. Then I heard there was a penalty for Ganassi.”
The victory ends an unusually long drought for Extreme E’s most successful team. The season one champions won five out of 10 races across the first two years of the championship, but haven’t been on the top step of the podium since the second Sardinia race of Season 2 a little over a year ago, which they won without any stewards’ intervention.
“We didn’t expect that, but it feels great to be back and we showed great pace as well,” Ahlin-Kottulinsky said.