Bird flies to the top in the afternoon

Envision Virgin Racing’s Sam Bird ended the day fastest for Envision Virgin Racing after a productive day in Valencia during the official FIA Formula E pre-season test.

The British driver set a 1m15.570s to edge out Maximillian Guenther in the BMW i Andretti Motorsport with DS Techeetah’s new signing Antonio Felix da Costa in third.

Mitch Evans was fourth quickest for Jaguar ahead of Jean-Eric Vergne in the other DS Techeetah and the Nissan e.dams duo of Sebastien Buemi and Oliver Rowland.

Mahindra’s Pascal Wehrlein, Robin Frijns in the other Envision Virgin entry and Audi’s Daniel Abt rounded out the top ten.

Alex Sims was 11^th for BMW ahead of the Season Three champion, Lucas di Grassi and Nico Mueller for Dragon.

Andre Lotterer set the 14^th quickest time for Porsche with Venturi’s Edoardo Mortara 15^th and Jerome d’Ambrosio 16^th in the second of the Mahindra entries.

Felipe Massa was 17^th in the Venturi ahead of Dragon’s Brendon Hartley, NIO’s Oliver Turvey and James Calado rounded out the top 20 for Jaguar.

Neel Jani was 21^st after his Porsche had been repaired following his trip to the wall at the chicane.

The Mercedes pairing of Stoffel Vandoorne and Nyck de Vries were next up with de Vries explaining the cause of his lack of mileage.

He said: “In the morning, we had quite few issues so didn’t really manage to do any proper running and most of our afternoon was compromised due to similar and different things”.

Ma Qing Hua was last for NIO.