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Finishing 14th in championship with 22 points might not seem like a stellar achievement, but in a car that ended up bottom of the teams’ championship, it was a fine return from the 23-year-old Kiwi.
Entering the championship in Season 3 meant that Panasonic Jaguar Racing was always going to be playing catch up at the start of the season, and during the first two races neither Evans nor team-mate Adam Carroll could even crack the top 15 in qualifying.
The first ray of light for the team came in Buenos Aires, where a fantastic qualifying effort put Evans seventh on the grid. A time penalty prevented him from scoring the team’s first point in the race, but that duly followed next time out in Mexico, where he somehow avoided the last-minute carnage caused by the Mahindras colliding to come home fourth.
He would never finish so high again, but there were three more top-10 qualifying performances – including an impressive sixth in Montreal – and two more points-scoring finishes. On top of this he also bagged the team’s first Visa Fastest Lap.
In total Evans scored over 80 per cent of Jaguar’s total points for the season and shows that if next year’s car takes a significant step forward in competitiveness, he’ll be in the fight for podiums.