A weekend filled with “gremlins” so far has left Chip Ganassi Racing with less mileage under its belt than any other team on the Extreme E grid, but it is aiming to ‘to figure out the car’ on Sunday with it being already out of victory contention.
The American outfit was the first to run in shakedown on Friday but ended up being struck by an electrical issue while Sara Price was in the Odyssey 21, then team-mate Kyle LeDuc crashed during his turn behind the wheel. On Saturday its performance in the first qualifying session around the desert course was pegged back by further electrical issues taking out the power steering.
CGR was still working on its all-electric SUV when it was due to run in Q2, and its failure to make it on track meant it failed to qualify for the Sunday races that lead to the final. Instead, it will be pitted against Abt Cupra (pending its crashed car being fully repaired in time) for seventh place.
“Same power steering software issue that we’ve been having. Electrical,” LeDuc told DirtFish after missing out on driving in Q2.
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“[It] wasn’t activating the power steering. We did the best we could to try to reverse-engineer and diagnose it, but it never turned on, we never got power.
“You could try to see if there’s a fault and fix the code, and do what you can, but it was not letting us do anything.
“[Chassis supplier] Spark was there, and they did their best. We have still work to do here, it’s still not right. We’ve got work to do, as do they.”
While LeDuc said he expected “two other cars missing” from his Sunday race, DirtFish understands Abt is on course to return to action in time to battle with CGR, and LeDuc is committed to being there himself as CGR “need to figure this car out” after the technical issues.
“They’re gremlins,” he said. “Our car is different than everyone’s car. I crashed mine, and they didn’t crash theirs.
“You never know where it lies. We’ll find out this afternoon, we’re going to dig deep into this to investigate it and figure it out.”
