Punta ePrix: Buemi tops first practice as Bird crashes

The British driver struck the barriers exiting the Turn 5-6 chicane, having broken his front-right suspension clipping the wall at the first apex, bringing out the red flags with eight minutes of the session remaining.

Prior to that, Bird had set the pace with a best time of 1m16.327s, the only lap that had been completed using the full 200kW of power, to go 1.2s clear of Lucas Di Grassi.

But once the session resumed with four minutes to go, Renault e.dams driver Buemi embarked on a full power lap of his own, smashing Bird’s time by a full 1.1s with a 1m15.179s.

Bird was therefore demoted to second, ahead of di Grassi and Jean-Eric Vergne, who had brought out the first red flags when his DS Virgin ground to a halt after 10 minutes.

The Frenchman then failed to clear the track by the time the session resumed, causing another brief red flag interruption before proceedings got going again in earnest.

Robin Frijns made a late improvement to fifth for Andretti, ahead of Nicolas Prost (Renault edams), Stephane Sarrazin (Venturi) and the Dragon Racing duo of Jerome D’Ambrosio and Loic Duval.

Nelson Piquet Jr completed the top 10, his NEXTEV teammate Oliver Turvey losing time after a brief stoppage in the pit entry.

Practice results:

Pos	Driver	Team	Time	Gap
1	Sébastien Buemi	DAMS	1:15.179	1:15.179
2	Sam Bird	Virgin Racing	1:16.327	+1.148
3	Lucas di Grassi	Audi Sport Team Abt	1:17.155	+1.976
4	Jean-Eric Vergne	Virgin Racing	1:17.930	+2.751
5	Robin Frijns	Andretti Autosport	1:18.052	+2.873
6	Nicolas Prost	DAMS	1:18.101	+2.922
7	Stéphane Sarrazin	Venturi	1:18.118	+2.939
8	Jérôme d'Ambrosio	Dragon Racing	1:18.175	+2.996
9	Loic Duval	Dragon Racing	1:18.274	+3.095
10	Nelson Piquet Jr.	China Racing	1:18.292	+3.113
11	Antonio Felix da Costa	Team Aguri	1:18.415	+3.236
12	Daniel Abt	Audi Sport Team Abt	1:18.421	+3.242
13	Oliver Rowland	Mahindra Racing	1:18.428	+3.249
14	Bruno Senna	Mahindra Racing	1:19.053	+3.874
15	Oliver Turvey	China Racing	1:19.120	+3.941
16	Nathanael Berthon	Team Aguri	1:19.305	+4.126
17	Simona de Silvestro	Andretti Autosport	1:19.639	+4.460
18	Jacques Villeneuve	Venturi	1:20.338	+5.159