Formula E's title fight turned sour in Tokyo, with Antonio Felix da Costa and Pascal Wehrlein both accusing Envision Racing of manipulating the first race of the weekend - and each other of making it worse.
The flashpoint came after Sebastien Buemi was handed a five-second penalty for contact with Nyck de Vries at Turn 7 on the opening lap. Envision responded by switching strategy, sending Buemi for an early six-minute ATTACK MODE on lap 14. He climbed from 13th to second by lap 18.
Then, as the regular pit window opened, Buemi's pace dropped away. Edoardo Mortara, da Costa and Wehrlein, running third, fourth and fifth, piled into the back of him through Turns 6 and 7. Da Costa and Wehrlein made contact several times. The Porsche broke a wing and its suspension. The Jaguar ended up in the TecPro barrier.
Da Costa was blunt about what he thought had happened.
"I'm very disappointed because I think we did the perfect race, we had more than two percent on the leaders," he said. "We had the perfect strategy to win it. [...] For some reason that I can't understand, when the pit window opened, Buemi pulled the handbrake and lost four seconds in three corners. It's very unsporting."
"I can't be mad at Seb because he is only following orders from his team, but I am very disappointed. Especially them being a Jaguar team, I would have hoped for some sort of comms or a warning."
He went further on Wehrlein, whose Porsche he tangled with as the pack bunched. "He crashed me out on purpose. He had damage from the corner before and I think he decided that if he is out, I am out, too."
Da Costa also accepted his own side had missed the signs. "We also have to blame ourselves a bit as well, because we should have been able to spot that and avoid it."
Buemi's version is more mundane. Nursing a badly bruised hand from the first-lap contact, he said the slow-down was an on-the-fly call to help team-mate Joel Eriksson through the field.
"It was on the go, and I think the team realised that obviously me slowing everyone down would obviously help massively, which it did, it did ultimately," Buemi said.
Asked whether that was a fair way to run a race while carrying a five-second penalty, he did not pretend it was clear-cut. "Whether that's totally fair or not, it's another discussion. I got instructed to do that and I just did what the team told me to do. But yeah, you may think it's correct or not, obviously it's not forbidden to do that. That's it. I just did that and obviously I don't think I made lots of friends."
He said he only learned of the pile-up afterwards.
Wehrlein went further than da Costa, raising the possibility that the call had come from outside Envision altogether. He expected the field to speed up as the window opened, not slow down.
"I don't know what the plan was with Buemi, why he was trying to hold up this whole group," he said. "He did exactly the opposite, so there was for sure a strategy behind it. Depends on from whom he was giving that call."
Pressed on the implication, Wehrlein drew a line between end-of-season deference and active interference. "There's always a bit of a game that towards the end of the season, you're supporting the best guy in the standings, that you're not driving super hard against him or that you swapped a position or whatever. But to actively change the race, we've never done that."
He also disputed the 10-second penalty he received for the da Costa incident, arguing he had been squeezed. "In that sequence of corners then I was on the inside, there's a rule in that sequence of corners where you need to be given space on the inside if you are side by side the corner before. I wasn't being given that. I got pushed into the inside wall and that destroyed my race."
The cost was real. Wehrlein arrived in Tokyo nine points clear and left it three behind Mitch Evans, who came from 16th to fourth. Porsche's day was compounded by damage to Nico Mueller's car after first-lap contact with da Costa - a car the team had already rebuilt around a new survival cell following a qualifying crash.
The Race understands the matter was discussed rather more cordially between Envision and Porsche once the paddock cooled down. With the title now decided over the London double-header, it will not be the last time the question of who helps whom gets asked.
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*Originally published on [Motorsports Global](https://motorsports.global/article/da-costa-and-wehrlein-accuse-envision-of-tokyo-team-orders). Visit for full coverage.*