Sebastien Buemi: Getting Back in the Saddle

It is said that for an under-pressure football manager, the worst time to take a defeat is immediately before an international break. Potentially facing up to two weeks before the next match, self-doubt can begin to fester beneath the surface and it is only when the referee's whistle blows for kick-off that attentions can shift elsewhere. They want the next game to come immediately so that they can right the wrongs of the previous defeat.

In many ways, the pressure-cooker environment of motorsport is little different, and if there is anybody itching for the second season of the FIA Formula E championship to kick off, it's Renault e.dams racer Sebastien Buemi.

Rewind to June 2015 and the climax to season one in London's Battersea Park, where changeable conditions in Sunday morning's qualifying session contrived to produce a topsy-turvy grid. By far the happiest of the title protagonists was Buemi, who qualified sixth, while chief rival Nelson Piquet Jr. languished down in 16th. With a slender five point deficit to overcome following his third victory of the season in the Saturday race, the title looked like it was Buemi's for the taking, but a good start and a well-timed Safety Car ensured Piquet remained in the hunt.

In a race of such tiny margins, any error would be hugely costly – and so it proved. On his first lap out of the pits on cold tyres following the car swap, Buemi locked up into the bumpy braking zone at turn three and spun, costing himself a place to Bruno Senna. Crucially, with Piquet passing Salvador Duran around the outside of turn 13 for seventh, Buemi now had to find a way back past Senna to win the title. The Swiss threw the kitchen sink and more at Senna and momentarily drew alongside on the final lap, but couldn't make the move stick. A more than relieved Piquet thus clinched the title by just one point, while a despondent Buemi was left to ponder what might have been.

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"My first reactions? I'm sad, frustrated, angry," he said afterwards. "But I'd like to say bravo to Nelson Piquet who's had a great season. We made a few mistakes that we have to accept; that's racing. Now it's time to turn the page and look forward to the coming season."

Buemi will have had plenty of time to take stock over Formula E's summer break. On his day, he was simply untouchable in season one, with his lights-to-flag victory in Monte Carlo the clear highlight, although his marauding drive through from the back of the grid to third in Putrajaya certainly ran it close.

Three pole positions, a tally matched only by fellow Formula One convert Jean-Eric Vergne, are nothing to sniff at either. Quickest from the word go in testing, Buemi and team-mate Nicolas Prost were among the first to properly get to grips with the unique driving style required to coax the best from the Spark-Renault SRT_01E, combining raw speed with canny energy management to devastating effect. Had it not been for an unsafe release in Moscow – which cost him third place and 13 valuable points – it could well have been Buemi giving the champions speech at the Natural History Museum gala and a clean sweep of both drivers and teams titles for Renault e.dams.

But then motorsport has never been straightforward; Just ask JR Hildebrand, who famously crashed out of the lead of the Centennial Indianapolis 500 on the final corner of the race in 2011, allowing the late Dan Wheldon to snatch an improbable victory. Mark Webber too lost his best – and only – shot at the Formula One crown in the blink of an eye when he drifted over a wet kerb and spun into the wall in Korea in 2010. In his recent autobiography, Webber looks back on that day as "the one unmitigated disaster of my 2010 season" and one which "came at precisely the most damaging time." Webber takes up the story after Abu Dhabi, where team-mate Sebastian Vettel took the title.

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"Despite my disappointment, I went to see Seb after the race and spent 20 minutes with him in his room, which he seemed to appreciate," he writes. "I was hurting badly but I had always been brought up by Mum and Dad to play hard yet fair and display sportsmanship even when you had been beaten. So I had to go and shake his hand. But I was in a bad way… I'm willing to admit it knocked the stuffing out of me. It was as if I had lost the championship in 2010 by 400 points rather than losing it by a handful of points at the final round. But once I was back in the car the competitive juices started to flow again."

Substitute Vettel for Piquet and these are plainly words that could have come directly from Buemi himself. The Swiss appeared visibly pained as he gave interviews to the assembled media after the chequered flag fell, evidently wishing he could be almost anywhere else.

But it's worth remembering that unlike the then 34-year-old Webber, who freely admits that he was planning to leave F1 after 2010 with the world championship in his pocket, Buemi – still only 26 – has plenty of time on his side to put the events of Battersea firmly behind him.

Now 27, Hildebrand hasn't completed a full-season in IndyCar since 2012, but finished in the top-ten at Indianapolis on his last two appearances. Speaking last year to the LA Times about the incident which still largely defines his career, the Californian said, "I know that I'm going to get asked about [the crash] all the time. But I want to be the guy who went through all this and had to deal with answering this question year after year after year and then added a chapter to this story."

Although Buemi has already achieved enough outside Formula E that his career won't be defined in a similar manner, the return to Beijing can't come soon enough. While we should be wary of reading too much into lap times from pre-season testing, it is worth noting that after topping the timesheets on the first and second days, Buemi felt sufficiently comfortable with his new Renault powertrain that he didn't need to go chasing times and instead choose to focus on race setup.

With his eyes on the prize and a point to prove, it would take a brave man to write off Sebastien Buemi just yet.