Jean-Èric Vergne simply walked away from the New York circuit during a meeting with the stewards, when he asked for punishment for Lucas Di Grassi for the accident that ended their race
During the last laps of race 2 of the eP New York, held last weekend, it was possible to see the drivers running normally on the track while a Venturi was stopped in the corner, near the protective wall: it was Lucas Di Grassi's car, which had just been involved in an incident with Jean-Èric Vergne - both abandoned. After the race, the Frenchman, summoned to the stewards to clarify his position, got upset with the course of the conversation and left the room - and the circuit.
The whole mess happened at the end, with three laps to go, when Di Grassi tried to take Vergne's tenth place and the DS Techeetah driver moved at the braking point, hitting his rival's car and ending their race. Di Grassi revealed that Vergne came in confident of a punishment for the Brazilian, but left quite unhappy when the touch was deemed a racing incident.
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"In the end, he touched the rear of my car and made me spin," Di Grassi summarized to the English website The Race. "When we went to see the commissioners, it was very clear that he was optimistic [about Di Grassi being punished]. In the end, it was considered a racing incident, and we moved on," the Brazilian driver pointed out.
"It was very clear that he suffered in the race and was having a bad weekend. But we didn't focus on him, we focused on us," he noted. "We were only there because we had an unfortunate mistake in qualifying that should never have happened. Otherwise, we would never have been in that position," he lamented.
The mistake Di Grassi refers to was really unexpected on the part of Venturi, which has been noted for its strong pace in qualifying and its strategic settings - especially regarding the activation of attack modes during races. However, the team did not respect the minimum pit stop time during qualifying and the Brazilian saw his time deleted, starting at the bottom of the grid.
While deliberations were going on in the commissioners' room, Vergne lost patience with the direction of the conversation. When he realized that the Brazilian driver would not be punished, the Frenchman left the room even before a verdict was reached and immediately left the circuit set up in New York.
The only statement from the driver - who had scored in all races of the year until he arrived in New York - was through an official statement from DS Techeetah. With the result, Vergne sees Stoffel Vandoorne open 27 points on the championship lead.
"The start was not very good, as I was on the inside and lost some positions in traffic," the statement reads. "Then the first part of the race was good, I fought my way up to tenth and then I got hit and hit the wall, so I couldn't add any points. But the season is not over yet, we still have four more races to battle for the championships," he finished.