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Jerome D’Ambrosio has celebrated his second podium of the Formula E season, after claiming second place in a challenging inaugural Visa London ePrix.
The Belgian driver’s day started badly after a bump in Turn 1 caused the right rear suspension to collapse during Free Practice 1, ending his session.
But a strong recovery during qualifying allowed him to start second, before holding off the advances of Jean-Eric Vergne to bring 18 points home.
“I knew that JEV was going for a shorter first stint so obviously that meant he was going to go out and as go as fast as he could on a push lap, so I tried to manage my gap,” he said.
“I wasn’t thinking too much about Seb, I was really thinking about JEV and tried to push in the last couple of laps in the stint, and that worked well, but it was still pretty tight in corner three with JEV when he got out of the box.”
The Berlin ePrix winner acknowledged that a championship challenge was always going to be difficult on a track where overtaking opportunities were few.
“The top three here are great drivers so expecting them to have failures was not realistic,” he said. “I was just focusing on the race and tried to do my best. It was really challenging but we had some good restarts which made our life easy.”
The Belgian praised the quick work of race officials in creating a solution to the bumpy Turn 1 section of the track.
“I don’t think they could have done better with the circumstances and time they had at their disposal,” he said. “Of course if you could have a little bit of re-asphalt that would be great, but the way the track is now I think it’s quite good.”