The fumble that inadvertently aided da Costa in Formula E's Cape Town classic

In 1488, the Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias became the first European to navigate the Cape of Good Hope, the peninsula that protrudes from the land that would later become part of South Africa in the modern era. He named it “The Cape of Storms” before it gained its current moniker later on, and it became a key landmark in early European sea trade to Asia as global exploration by boat later reached its zenith in the 1500s.

Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that on Formula E’s first visit to the bustling trade hub that spawned just to the north, it was another Portugal native who successfully traversed the Cape; from 11th on the grid, Porsche’s Antonio Felix da Costa weathered the storm to clinch his first victory of the season in scintillating fashion.

It’s been nearly 30 years since South Africa last held a world championship single-seater race, that being Formula 1’s South African Grand Prix at Kyalami. Formula E, after a year’s delay, broke that hiatus in a bombastic and breathless Cape Town encounter that will probably go down as one of the championship’s greatest races.

Bookended by Table Mountain and the South Atlantic Ocean, Cape Town’s Green Point district is easily one of the most visually spectacular sites for a race to have taken place. The circuit itself featured a fast and flowing stretch along the beachfront, before folding into the parkland that homes the Cape Town Stadium to produce a venue that promised fast, flowing and frantic action. On every front, it delivered; a sell-out crowd came to celebrate a leap forward in South African motorsport, and they were treated to a race that had every conceivable quality in spades.

Da Costa’s bravery was at the heart of his spellbinding drive, ironically at the expense of a driver who had dismissed that very attribute before the weekend. Speaking in the pre-race press conference, Hyderabad winner Jean-Eric Vergne suggested that the need to “get everything under control” was more important in tackling the 1.8-mile course around Cape Town than “being brave”. To his credit, approximately 20 minutes after being dispatched by an audacious da Costa overtake, Vergne retracted that comment.

The opening four races of the 2022-23 season had been of a single theme: that of the burgeoning title battle between Pascal Wehrlein and Jake Dennis. After Dennis drew first blood in Mexico City, Wehrlein’s double Diriyah wins put the two above the rest of the field, the German extending his title lead in Hyderabad with fourth place. That said, the emergence of Jaguar and DS Penske after the opening rounds of the season had suggested that the Porsche-powered duo would not have the run of the place thereafter.

Fenestraz got to grips with the Cape Town track's fast sweeps best in the Duels to snare his first pole for Nissan

Photo by: Alastair Staley / Motorsport Images

For all its pace, the works Jaguar squad had found new ways to self-combust as Sam Bird speared into Mitch Evans in India to knock both cars out of the running. As Vergne led DS Penske’s efforts with his win there, the softly spoken Nick Cassidy quietly emerged as the Jag-powered Envision team’s leading light.

Hyderabad’s form partially looked to have carried over into practice as Cassidy ended the pair of practice sessions on top of the pile, but this was before qualifying in Cape Town proved to be something of a palate-cleanser from the season’s bigger-ticket storylines. The nature of the session had been foreshadowed by Sebastien Buemi’s Turn 9 crash in FP1, where the Swiss carried too much speed through the downhill and high-speed left-hander and slapped his Envision against the outside wall.

Group A had been relatively clean, and da Costa and Dennis were the biggest scalps claimed by those who made the duels as Sacha Fenestraz dumped the 2019-20 champion out of the top four with an assured lap to head the session. But Group B was messy; Edoardo Mortara hit the Turn 9 wall to bring out a red flag, and Bird followed him in about 20 seconds later, hamstrung by a delay to the red flag signals as he approached the right-left flick on entry.

Speaking after the race, da Costa explained that he’d allotted the “first 40%” of the event for energy-saving purposes. Content to run in the pack, he was still nonetheless making up ground

Bird had looked threatening up until that moment, but offered the on-the-cusp Maximilian Guenther safe passage into the duels, as the German narrowly missed his stricken Maserati MSG team-mate’s car by a hair to set up a battle with countryman Rene Rast. The Bavarian beat Rast as the Italo-Monegasque team showed improved pace following a difficult opening to the year, making the final after beating Mitch Evans by three tenths in their semi-final.

Fenestraz had an equally difficult road ahead, but buccaneered his way past Vergne and Cassidy to set up a left-field finale – guaranteeing a new Formula E polesitter whichever way the tempestuous winds blew. It was Guenther who fell at the final hurdle, as Fenestraz dazzled and outpaced the three-time race winner by 0.4s to secure a first pole in his sixth FE event.

After grid penalties and withdrawals were applied, da Costa took up 11th on the grid and could be generously billed as an ‘outside bet’ in normal circumstances. But the norm was not expected; drivers spoke of leading the early phases as nothing more than an inconvenience given the energy-hungry nature of the devilishly quick Cape Town course. He barely entered the E-Prix’s lexicon in the opening phases, amid a race so wild it could barely be contained in one of the local safari parks.

Speaking after the race, da Costa explained that he’d allotted the “first 40%” of the event for energy-saving purposes. Content to run in the pack, he was still nonetheless making up ground; he’d cleared Norman Nato at the start, but an unlikely benefactor in the shape of his championship-leading team-mate offered two more places by the close of the first lap.

Fenestraz got the jump off the line as back in the pack da Costa resigned himself to saving energy early doors

Photo by: Carl Bingham / Motorsport Images

On the run into Turn 10, where the circuit diverted away from the Mouille Point beach, Wehrlein was all at sea on the brakes and ran into the back of Buemi, coming to rest in the run-off. Buemi managed to escape with little damage, but da Costa was now up to eighth as the race order was frozen thanks to a safety car period.

Once green-flag running resumed, da Costa was able to shuffle up three more places in the following laps. Dan Ticktum picked up his first dose of attack mode on lap eight, while Evans was slapped with a drive-through penalty for an overpower spike that brought his own victory hopes to rest. Now sixth, da Costa moved up a further position on the 15th tour when Rast took his own hit of 350kW power, and crucially maintained it when reaching for a three-minute activation a lap later.

Vergne was next on his list, but it took a second attack mode to clear the pipes and bring da Costa in touch with the leading trio of Cassidy, Fenestraz and Guenther. The latter had led through the opening safety car period, but only through overtaking polesitter Fenestraz, before the two were cleared by the hard-charging Cassidy through their own attack mode battles. At this juncture, Fenestraz was keeping in touch with the Kiwi, but Guenther’s clumsy brush with the wall at Turn 1 threw another spanner into the works.

Perhaps anticipating a yellow-flag enforced stoppage as Guenther parked up at the Turn 4/5 chicane, Cassidy and Fenestraz opted to pick up their second attack modes, but the latter ceded two positions to da Costa and Vergne seconds before the full-course yellow took effect. The order was not frozen for long as the damaged Maserati MSG was cleared up swiftly, setting up a battle for the lead once the green flag had flown.

Having led for much of the race thus far, Cassidy was at an energy disadvantage to da Costa and seemed ripe for the picking. On the 24th lap, da Costa chased the leader out of Turn 7 and swept around the outside of the Turn 8 kink, getting the inside line for the next corner to pick up the lead in stunning fashion. With Cassidy still trying to save energy, the Porsche driver easily built enough of a gap to theoretically take attack mode and return to the circuit in the lead. Vergne made his way past Cassidy too, but da Costa had enough to go off-line and remain in front.

Except, it didn’t quite work out. Da Costa missed one of the three activation loops, proving only to be an exercise in losing time to the chasing Vergne, and thus the two were split by just over half a second. Thus, da Costa had to take a second bite of the cherry two laps later, granting Vergne the lead – a day after the Frenchman reckoned winning in South Africa would be “completely unrealistic”.

Lesser drivers would have wilted under the disappointment, but da Costa was not about to let the win go. By returning in Vergne’s wheeltracks, he could actually bank a little more energy for a late-race charge, particularly as the earlier safety car period resulted in two laps being added on. The two were separated by a whisker and, on the penultimate lap, da Costa made his ultimate play.

Missing his final attack mode activation meant da Costa had to resort to an all-or-nothing move to repass Vergne

Photo by: Andreas Beil

It was a near-carbon copy of the move he’d put on Cassidy. Grabbing onto Vergne’s coat-tails on the exit of Turn 7, da Costa expected his former team-mate to be armed with the knowledge of his previous efforts into Turn 8. In that instance, the #13 car dummied right to let Vergne cover, and then switched sides and squeezed through at Turn 8 – the two barely separated by a cigarette paper through the corner – to leave the crowd in raptures. Although remaining on da Costa’s tail, Vergne couldn’t return the favour: the battle was over, and da Costa admitted that he’d cried with joy throughout the entire in-lap as the gravity of the situation began to sink in.

“I knew I had the right guys next to me to cooperate through these overtakes,” da Costa explained after the race. “And obviously I was up on energy, so I could afford to pull these overtakes. It feels really good.

“The race played out perfectly for us with the second safety car, making everyone having to save a little bit more energy. That helped me. I tried to save a little bit of energy in the first 40% of the race, and the race came to us – everything just played out how we wanted it to.

“Some days it’s like this, it just comes your way. And I’m happy that I was able to pull the rabbit out of the hat when I had to.”

"If he didn’t miss the attack mode, I would’ve stayed behind him, saved energy, and then maybe be in a position to make that move" Jean-Eric Vergne

Of course, da Costa’s race-winning move would simply not have been possible if not for that attack mode fumble, but Vergne reckoned that missing the timing loops actually played into his rival’s hands owing to the advantage of having a slipstream in the late stages of the race.

“This is the moment where he could get more energy and put that attack on me,” Vergne concluded. “I think that if he didn’t miss the attack mode, I would’ve stayed behind him, saved energy, and then maybe be in a position to make that move.”

An overwhelmingly popular event among the drivers, Cape Town’s stunning vistas and beachside proximity was already spectacular. A breathless race only enhanced that, leaving Formula E’s fanbase hoping for more races in South Africa’s Mother City, and da Costa’s sail to victory around the Cape echoed that of his forefathers in the 15th century.

Translated literally into English, Antonio Felix da Costa’s name can be interpreted as ‘Antonio: felicitous, of the coast’. There could not be a more apt winner of Cape Town’s inaugural Formula E race than he.

After Wehrlein's faux-pas, Porsche still secured honours as da Costa denied Vergne back-to-back wins

Photo by: Alastair Staley / Motorsport Images