Formula E's first race winner spent his last weekend watching the car break.
Lucas di Grassi's Formula E career ended with a technical failure, in a car he had already pitted once from the start. He did not see the finish. The man who won the first race the series ever held, in Beijing in 2014, watched the last one from the side of the track.
Saturday had gone the same way with a longer reach. On lap 21 of round 16 di Grassi went straight on into the wall at Turn 9, and Formula E's report records the Full Course Yellow that followed as the one that handed Pascal Wehrlein a free Pit Boost. Wehrlein won that race and, the following afternoon, the championship. The founding champion's last competitive act was to help the arriving one, by crashing.
The numbers he leaves with were fixed a while ago. Formula E's own preview counts 163 starts, 14 wins and 42 podiums, with the title in 2016/17, the third season. Ten of those wins came in his first six years. He told RACER before the weekend that he had "zero regrets in a way," closing a 24-year driving career at 42, and by his own description he was "already the oldest by far in the championship."
Equipment decided how that read on the day. The Race called the Lola Yamaha ABT weekend lamentable, citing constant reliability problems across both cars, and put the consequence plainly: the failures "completely dampened Lucas di Grassi's farewell. He deserved so much better. There were inevitably tears in the garage." A driver gets one final start and no say in whether the car completes it.
Sebastien Buemi got the other version. Formula E's second champion, in 2015/16, finished both races for Envision and was the higher placed of the two men leaving. He also had a hand in the title, though not one he chose: Wehrlein's engineer waved him past in the sequence that swung the championship twice inside half a lap.
What Buemi is actually stopping is broader than the team change. The Race reported before the weekend that his 12-year Formula E career ends here, after he decided against pursuing a GEN4 seat, and that he will concentrate on the Toyota endurance programme instead. He does not leave the paddock entirely: RACER reports Envision retaining him in an advisory and development capacity, with team principal Sylvain Filippi saying his experience "will remain valuable to us."
His team mate goes too. Joel Eriksson, a rookie whose single podium came at Shanghai in round 13, went out of the finale after Wehrlein tagged him into a spin, the contact that put Jake Dennis in the wall. Envision confirmed both departures three days before the finale, clearing two seats for what it calls an all new line up for 2026/27.
The car they were driving is finished as well, and so is the building it finished in. Di Grassi's grid, his car and his venue all stopped on the same afternoon, which spares the series the question of what to do with a 42 year old founding champion in a formula built for somebody else. Buemi answered that question himself, by choosing an endurance seat over one he could probably have kept. Di Grassi never got the choice: he put it in the wall on Saturday and the car stopped on Sunday, and the lap of honour he was owed after 163 starts never came.