Maserati MSG Racing driver, Maximilian Günther, secured a landmark victory at the inaugural Tokyo E-Prix to win the first-ever sanctioned race to be held on the streets of the Japanese capital.
Max, from Oberstdorf, Germany, entered the race weekend with momentum after executing the comeback performance of the season at the São Paulo E-Prix two weeks earlier, where he recovered from a 40-place grid penalty to finish ninth.
Facing challenging and changeable damp circuit conditions across practice, the 26-year-old showed promising early pace after placing third in FP1 and FP2 and used his performance to his advantage to progress to the duel stages of qualifying.
Max advanced to the qualifying Quarter-Finals after setting the fastest time in Group B, and by facing and defeating Porsche’s Pascal Wehrlein, progressed to the Semi-Finals where he outpaced Sergio Sette Camara by 2.198 seconds.
This performance pitted Max against Oliver Rowland in the Final where, despite outpacing the Nissan driver in Sectors Two and Three, he unfortunately missed out on pole position by only 0.021 seconds to line up on the front row of the grid.
Starting off the racing line, Max struggled for traction when the race got underway and lost second place to Edoardo Mortara on lap one, although he quickly settled into a rhythm in pursuit of the Mahindra driver.
By carefully leveraging his Attack Mode strategy to his advantage, Max successfully overcut Mortara and Rowland to take the lead on lap 13 before deploying his first activation on lap 14 to return to third.
With the benefit of extra power, however, Max swiftly overtook Mortara for second and started to apply pressure on Rowland, who was briefly relieved by a Safety Car on lap 20 which was deployed for debris on track.
Max resumed his pursuit for victory on lap 22 and performed a critical overtake on Rowland on lap 25 before setting out to build an advantage, with aim of creating a large enough gap to activate his second Attack Mode without sacrificing track position.
Max successfully did this on lap 28, and despite facing pressure from behind in the closing stages, remained in front to take the chequered flag and victory in Tokyo – a result which marked his fifth race win in the FIA Formula E World Championship.
With 48 points on the board after five races, Max holds fifth in the Formula E World Drivers’ Championship and will resume his season on 13-14 April 2024 for the Misano E-Prix – the Maserati brand’s home race in Italy.
