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Even the Abu Dhabi Self-Driving Car Racing League
When Oliver Rowland returns to his Nissan Formula E seat this week, he insists he won’t be thinking about any “if only…” about the 2024 title challenge that his absence from Portland seems to have snatched from his grasp.
Rowland was unable to travel to the penultimate event of the year in the United States due to illness, meaning he missed out on the chance to capitalise on a disastrous weekend for overall championship leader Nick Cassidy.
If Rowland had been able to replicate the kind of heroics he has shown elsewhere this season in Portland, he could at least have joined Cassidy’s main pursuers Mitch Evans and Pascal Wehrlein in being within striking distance of Cassidy ahead of his final two home races in London this week.
Instead, Rowland was forced to watch those races on television before heading to the Calafat circuit in Spain last week to test his fitness ahead of the final.
The test was positive and Roland is now fit to compete at the ExCeL Arena indoor and outdoor track in London.
“I was disappointed not to be there,” Rowland tells The Race. “I didn’t know if I would be able to watch the races to be honest. It felt weird.
“Then after that, obviously Cassidy didn’t score much and nobody around me scored much, which was frustrating and disappointing.”
Rowland now heads to London in fifth place in the standings, 36 points behind Cassidy, making him an outsider for the title. But he won’t give up, even though he never thought he could be a contender this season.
“I think strange things have happened in Formula E. I’m still only 36 points behind, so anything can happen,” he says.
“Look, it was never our goal to win the championship. It could happen if things go a certain way. All you need is a great first day where you qualify well and win the championship. Then suddenly, if the results go in the right direction, it could look completely different.
“But for us, it’s like any other race; we go there and try to improve and try to improve our performance. If it’s fast enough, I’m sure we’ll be in contention to win. If not, we’ll look to improve on the second day and focus on next year as well, so there’s no pressure at all really.”
Fall of the Strangers
In fact, Antonio Felix da Costa is probably the only player outside the rankings you would consider betting on.
He is 33 points behind Cassidy – and three ahead of Rowland and fourth overall – meaning only a set of outrageous circumstances could create an extraordinary and unexpected title shift on the final weekend.
But the drivers have legitimate reasons to wonder what might have happened had certain scenarios played out more positively. In both cases, Porsche and Nissan drivers suffered from slow starts to the season and lost points that they had no part in creating.
Da Costa’s poor starts in Mexico and Saudi Arabia were more evident than Rowland’s, with the Nissan driver managing to secure pole position and then turn it into third in the second race of the Diriyah Grand Prix in January.
But at Misano in April, da Costa lost maximum points, disqualified after his Porsche was judged to have used the wrong throttle spring, while in the second race Rowland was on course for victory when his car ran out of usable power on the final lap – the result of a Nissan starting procedure error.
Add to that the two races Rowland missed, and in another world he could easily have been Cassidy’s closest rival and biggest worry before the final.
“I’ve already accepted the whole thing in my mind,” says Roland. “You can’t spend too much time thinking about these things, [though] I’m sure there will be a little idea on Sunday if it’s close.
“You can always look and say ‘what if’, but really the pure priority this year was not to win the championship.
“Even talking about a situation where we could have been in the running is great. And I think that puts us in a really good position for next year as well.”
Rowland has already begun testing Nissan’s Gen3 Evo package ahead of 2025. It’s a season that holds great promise given Nissan’s efforts to centralise its programme after years of more expansive operations that included the e.dams organisation and the Viry-Chatillon engine headquarters of the Renault Formula 1 team (now Alpine).
That pure factory feel is now starting to pay off, and Rowland was particularly direct about how different and efficient the setup is now compared to when he drove the team in its previous guise from 2018 to 2021.
So there is no doubt that Nissan will be the main competitor to Porsche and Jaguar-powered cars in the first season of the updated rules which starts in December.
Rowland, who is two races behind the leaders in the points table, will certainly be at the forefront of this challenge and, with a little more luck, could bring the Japanese manufacturer its first ever world championship title.
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