Misano E-Prix Sunday winner Pascal Wehrlein wasn’t overly pleased with the style of racing at the Italian track over the weekend, branding it “chaotic.”

Long straights coupled with a lack of heavy braking zones put a premium on energy saving, leading to pack racing with multiple position changes as drivers scrambled to save enough energy for a dash to the finish. Porsche driver Antonio Felix da Costa likened it to the Daytona 500, saying, “It’s exactly that…the leader is not flat out for the first 60 or 70 percent of the race, so it’s a little bit similar.”

While the end result might have been an entertaining TV product with multiple overtakes — there were 544 passes in the Saturday race alone — it proved somewhat frustrating for those on track.

Sunday had the potential to be tamer than Saturday, with the race being two laps shorter, but the end result was largely the same.

“I think it hasn’t changed a lot,” said Wehrlein. “Obviously it’s less laps but also when there’s more grip it’s more difficult to recuperate the energy, so targets were a little bit higher. But I still feel like the beginning of the race is super-chaotic — it just feels like too much chaos and it makes qualifying a little bit irrelevant, which I feel like is also a bit of a shame.”

Wehrlein also pointed out how qualifying bore little meaning in Italy. He won from third on the grid, but his fellow podium finishers, Jake Dennis and Nick Cassidy, started further back — ninth and eighth respectively — while Saturday winner Oliver Rowland started that race fifth with on-the-road winner da Costa charging to the front from 13th.

“We spend so much time and energy in the simulator before coming to the race weekends. We try to optimize our settings, the energy, the setup and everything for half a tenth, one tenth… [We] spend three days, and then you turn up here and qualifying is irrelevant,” he said. “It also feels like all the work you do coming to that event… I’m not saying it’s irrelevant, but in the end it is a bit.”

Dennis, meanwhile, was more upbeat about how both Misano races played out, saying that it was important to strike a balance between peloton-style races like those in Italy, and more subdued events like the Tokyo E-Prix two weeks ago.

“From my side, I felt like it was a step in the right direction but I generally, as long as it’s not too bad, quite enjoy these races in comparison to say, Tokyo, where it’s the complete opposite end of the spectrum, where it can be a bit dull for the fans and as soon as the second Attack Mode’s done, you know where you’re finishing,” he said. “This has a little bit more excitement, and from my side with the way Formula 1 is at the moment, it’s important to bring something different instead of just a procession of everyone just driving around in a train.

“These cars are incredibly difficult to overtake in when we have a lot of energy — like way harder than anything else. In comparison to F1, F2, we don’t have DRS, so we need this excitement.”

As for the track itself, both Dennis and Wehrlien liked it, but felt it could do with some adjustments should Formula E return.

“I think the biggest issue is the chicane — the way it pinches so much really doesn’t allow too much, to go two wide through there, and it’s a bit too much of a stop/start,” said Dennis. “I think Portland’s first chicane has a better compromise, but the straights are much longer, much wider, so you get eight wide or something like that, whereas here [if] you have two/three wide into a Portland [style] chicane, I think it would be quite nice. But when you have two/three wide into a single-file chicane which is 50 kph, it’s incredibly difficult for us to judge the concertina effect.

“I think if we come back here next year [there] needs to be…tuning through Turns 8 and 9. I think everything else is pretty well aligned. Sector one worked well; you could really divebomb someone on the inside into Turn 2, so I feel like the track was better than I thought it was going to be. It’s just [Turns 8 and 9], the chicane, needs a bit of refining for next year.”

Wehrlein added, “I think Jake said something really good, that we probably expected it to be worse than it was. For one push lap, the track feels actually nice, it feels good, and there are certainly a few things which could have been different like the track limits and the huge [curbs], the yellow sausages and so on.

“There are certain things that could have been better, but overall I think it has been quite a nice track for one lap driving. For the race, I’m not a big fan of those chaotic races in the beginning.”

The move to Misano came as Italy’s previous Formula E track on the streets of Rome was “right at the limit of where the car is from a power point of view,” according to series CEO Jeff Dodds, but Wehrlein hopes a solution to return there can be found.

“All of us drivers are big fans of the Rome track,” he said. “Hopefully we can go back there in the future. I think that would be the best solution.”