Formula E's championship top four all scored nothing at Sanya. Mitch Evans's 19-point lead survived a race he never finished..
Jake Dennis won the Sanya E-Prix from pole on June 20, leading an Andretti one-two across the line before the stewards unwound it, on Formula E's first visit to the Haitang Bay street circuit in seven years. The race produced a lap 19 red flag few in the paddock thought was needed, fourteen penalty decisions, and one statistic that overshadowed the win: the four drivers at the top of the championship scored nothing between them. Mitch Evans left China still leading by 19 points after a race he did not finish.
Sanya showed its character before the lights, when Citroen left wheel covers on Jean-Eric Vergne's car on the dummy grid and drew a 2,500-euro fine. The lead then changed hands repeatedly across the 39 laps, Dennis trading the front with Dan Ticktum, Wehrlein, Nick Cassidy, Mortara and da Costa as the field cycled energy and Attack Mode against one another. A crash for Norman Nato brought a full course yellow on lap 28, one more interruption in a race that rarely strung together five clean laps.
Dennis led the opening eight laps from his first pole since Jakarta, then handed the position to Pascal Wehrlein on lap 9 to save energy, dropping as far back as sixth before his lap 16 Attack Mode carried him back to the front. He took his second and final Attack Mode on lap 32 and led for the third time across the 39 laps, this time to the flag. Formula E rewards the driver who still has energy when everyone else has spent theirs, and Dennis timed all three of his lead changes to be the one holding it at the end rather than in the middle.
The race turned on lap 19 at Turn 9, where Zane Maloney and Evans interlocked wheels and three more cars slid into the stranded pair. Race director Marek Hanczewski called a red flag inside nine seconds, saying the wall at Turn 9 needed checking, though no car had touched the wall. The cars untangled and the track was clear moments later, and most of the paddock said a full course yellow would have covered it. "I don't understand why we had the red flag," Jaguar's Antonio Felix da Costa told The Race, "but I don't understand a lot of things these guys do."
Twenty minutes passed before the race resumed, a delay the reigning champion called excessive. "It just took them too long to restart it," said Oliver Rowland, who sits on the drivers' group that liaises with the FIA and who wants "a quick restart procedure in situations like that, like you see in MotoGP." The stoppage reset tyre temperature, energy targets and Attack Mode planning at a stroke, handing every strategist a fresh problem with no rehearsal and no certainty about running order on the restart.
Fourteen penalty decisions turned the result into a moving target for hours after the flag. Da Costa crossed the line second on the road and was demoted to fourth for moving under braking into Norman Nato, a call the stewards conceded was coloured by an earlier warning that a "technical issue" had failed to display. Nyck de Vries was penalised and then un-penalised when his own warning proved wrongly applied, which moved him up rather than down. Felipe Drugovich lost second place, and Andretti lost the first one-two in its Formula E history, to a five-second penalty for contact with Wehrlein. Da Costa, still baffled in the stewards' room afterward, posted that "there is no consistency on penalties" and that it "makes it hard to fight for a championship." His harmless touch with Nato drew the same five seconds that Wehrlein received for tipping Nato out of the race terminally a few laps later, which was the paddock's point about consistency made in a single comparison.
Josep Marti inherited that vacated second place from 18th on the grid, a podium for Cupra Kiro the timing screens did not confirm until long after the cars had stopped. Nyck de Vries completed the rostrum for Mahindra less than a week after winning the Le Mans 24 Hours on his debut with Toyota, a fortnight that carried him from the top step at La Sarthe to a Formula E podium he was awarded by penalty rather than took on track. Dennis finished 2.1 seconds clear of the next classified car, the one number all afternoon that the stewards left alone.
Evans holds 128 points, Oliver Rowland 109, Edoardo Mortara 103 and Pascal Wehrlein 101, which leaves 27 points covering four drivers who all came away empty. That is where Sanya did its real damage, by doing none at all. Rowland, the reigning champion, lost the car into the barriers in a late battle. Mortara retired on lap 20. Wehrlein crossed the line 14th and outside the points. Evans was among the retirements, classified two laps short after an incident-filled afternoon he still walked away from with his margin to the point. Dennis was the day's clearest winner in the standings as well as on the road, his second victory of the season lifting him to fifth on 94, while da Costa's recovery to fourth kept Jaguar scoring on a day its lead driver did not.
Evans built his 19-point cushion at Monaco by scoring; he kept all of it at Sanya by watching the only three men who could cut it fail on the same afternoon. It is the rare race in which the leader's worst day costs him nothing. A title lead is usually a record of what a driver did. After June 20, Evans's is partly a record of what his rivals did not.
Formula E reconvenes in Shanghai for a double-header on July 4 and 5, with two weeks to absorb what Sanya exposed. Teams have been told the same Haitang Bay layout returns in 2027, when the larger, faster Gen4 car arrives on a circuit whose Turn 9 hairpin and narrow pit straight produced most of this weekend's contact. Formula E has already judged London's ExCeL too tight for that machine. It has not yet explained why Sanya, with the same problem on plainer view, is treated differently.