Buenos Aires ePrix: Bird tops FP2, Di Grassi crashes

The DS Virgin Racing driver won last year’s race in Argentina and improved contentiously to head the session on a 1m08.792s.

That lap came after Lucas di Grassi crashed in his Abt Audi Sport entry and brought out the yellow flags at the start of the middle sector.

Bird insisted over the team radio that he backed off under the yellow, but still found enough time elsewhere to leapfrog Mahindra’s Felix Rosenqvist.

“It’s gone OK so far,” said Bird. “The car feels OK, we’ve had some issues to combat and I’ll have to combat them for the rest of the weekend.”

The British driver said the problem was “temperature-related”, having already suffered an issue with a faulty regen paddle – how he initiates harvesting energy from the electric motor – in Friday’s shakedown.

Marrakesh polesitter Rosenqvist was 0.165s slower than Bird, with di Grassi third ahead of championship leader Sebastien Buemi, whose second 200kW effort was ruined by the yellow flags.

FP2 had only just resumed when di Grassi shunted.

Loic Duval shed a wheel on his Faraday Future Dragon Racing car just after the halfway mark of the 30-minute session, which caused a red flag.

Before that, Oliver Turvey had clipped the wall at the Turn 9/10 chicane, and Jaguar’s Adam Carroll and Bird spun at Turn 5 earlier on.

FP1 pacesetter Jose Maria Lopez was only 17th fastest in the second of the DS Virgin cars.

Free Practice 2 results

Pos.	Driver	Team	Time	Gap	Laps
1	Sam Bird	DS Virgin	1:08.792		17
2	Felix Rosenqvist	Mahindra	1:08.957	0.165	15
3	Lucas di Grassi	ABT Schaeffler	1:09.054	0.262	15
4	Sebastien Buemi	Renault	1:09.127	0.335	15
5	Robin Frijns	Andretti	1:09.166	0.374	16
6	Nelson Piquet Jr	NEXTEV TCR	1:09.213	0.421	17
7	Oliver Turvey	NEXTEV TCR	1:09.265	0.473	18
8	Jean-Eric Vergne	Techeetah	1:09.314	0.522	14
9	Nicolas Prost	Renault	1:09.472	0.680	13
10	Maro Engel	Venturi	1:09.596	0.804	18
11	Daniel Abt	ABT Schaeffler	1:09.613	0.821	20
12	Antonio Felix da Costa	Andretti	1:09.742	0.950	14
13	Nick Heidfeld	Mahindra	1:09.846	1.054	12
14	Stephane Sarrazin	Venturi	1:10.140	1.348	18
15	Ma Qing Hua	Techeetah	1:10.320	1.528	17
16	Mitch Evans	Jaguar	1:10.480	1.688	18
17	Jose Maria Lopez	DS Virgin	1:10.644	1.852	17
18	Jerome d'Ambrosio	Dragon	1:10.884	2.092	17
19	Loïc Duval	Dragon	1:11.486	2.694	7
20	Adam Carroll	Jaguar	1:11.792	3.000	18