Oliver Rowland beats Vergne to his first FE pole positon at Sanya
Nissan e.dams driver Oliver Rowland will start on pole position for ABB FIA Formula E's first race at Sanya ahead of reigning champion Jean-Eric Vergne
Rowland and DS Techeetah's Vergne both made it through to the superpole session from the third group qualifying, along with practice pacesetter Sebastien Buemi and Alexander Sims.
On his superpole lap Rowland made the difference to Vergne in the second sector, before wrestling his car through the fast Turn 10 right-hander and nearly clipping the wall on the exit.
He held on to set a best time of 1m07.945s, which was 0.1s faster than Vergne, who was delighted to take his first row start since the second round of the season in Marrakech.
Buemi, who was fastst in his qualifying group, had an incident that looked very similar to a crash he had in the second practice session, going nose first into the Turn 3 barrier, at the corner where the attack mode activation is located.
That ruined his superpole attempt and placed him fifth provisionally, until he was disqualified from superpole for an unspecified brake system infringement.
Buemi will start the Sanya E-Prix from the pitlane.
Sims could only qualify sixth after he could not take part due to a suspected gear selection issue.
He was able to reverse away and ended up over 25 seconds off the pace in superpole, but will start ahead of Sims because he completed the lap.
Antonio Felix da Costa and Daniel Abt were the other superpole runners, and they ended up third and fourth, with da Costa losing time with a wild slide at the final corner on his flying lap.
Andre Lotterer will start seventh for Techeetah, ahead of Jerome d'Ambrosio, who ended up as the second highest group one runner behind da Costa for Mahindra Racing.
Pascal Wehrlein qualified ninth behind his Mahindra team-mate, with Lucas di Grassi rounding out the top 10 for Audi after failing to make it out of group one.
Hong Kong winner - and group one runner - Edoardo Mortara qualified 11th, just ahead of Robin Frijns (Envision Virgin Racing) and HWA driver Stoffel Vandoorne.
Jose Maria Lopez and a Felipe Massa will start 14th and 15th.
Current championship leader Sam Bird will start in 16th after he ended up as the slowest runner in group one, having been the first driver to take to the track in that segment.
Tom Dillmann, Felipe Nasr and Oliver Turvey will line up in positions 17th-19th.
Jaguar duo Mitch Evans and Nelson Piquet Jr will start 20th and 22nd, split by HWA's Gary Paffett, who went very deep at the Turn 8 hairpin and lost significant time in group four.
Evans struck the wall on the inside of the fast right of Turn 5, tearing off a strip of advertising branding as he did so, which got stuck to the right-hand side of his car and trailed behind as he completed his group two lap.
Piquet was a second adrift of the top spot at the end of sector one on his 250kW run in group four and qualified last after losing more time at Turn 8.
Starting grid
Pos | Driver | Team | Gap |
---|---|---|---|
1 | Oliver Rowland | e.dams | 1m07.945s |
2 | Jean-Eric Vergne | DS Techeetah | 0.100s |
3 | Antonio Felix da Costa | BMW | 0.177s |
4 | Daniel Abt | Audi | 0.386s |
5 | Alexander Sims | BMW | - |
6 | Sebastien Buemi | e.dams | -0.275 |
7 | Andre Lotterer | DS Techeetah | 0.426s |
8 | Jerome d'Ambrosio | Mahindra | 0.427s |
9 | Pascal Wehrlein | Mahindra | 0.510s |
10 | Lucas di Grassi | Audi | 0.523s |
11 | Edoardo Mortara | Venturi | 0.559s |
12 | Robin Frijns | Virgin | 0.601s |
13 | Stoffel Vandoorne | HWA | 0.615s |
14 | Jose Maria Lopez | Dragon | 0.623s |
15 | Felipe Massa | Venturi | 0.640s |
16 | Sam Bird | Virgin | 0.696s |
17 | Tom Dillmann | NIO | 0.855s |
18 | Felipe Nasr | Dragon | 0.878s |
19 | Oliver Turvey | NIO | 0.978s |
20 | Mitch Evans | Jaguar | 1.010s |
21 | Gary Paffett | HWA | 1.127s |
22 | Nelson Piquet Jr. | Jaguar | 1.454s |
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