The world’s premier electric racing series had a rough weekend in Valencia. The series’ first ePrix on a dedicated racing circuit (instead of at a street circuit) ended with half the field running out of energy in a rain-soaked Saturday race.

The fifth round of the 2020-2021 season, the race took place at the Circuit Ricardo Tormo in Spain. The series conducts pre-season testing at the track, so the comedy of errors was down more to the high number of incidents and a quirk of how the race length is determined, rather than lack of experience there.

With four safety car incidents breaking up the progression of the race, you would expect the cars to be able to run longer. And they should be able to, but to prevent the cars from having a surplus of energy at the end of the race and spoiling the strategic competition, the FIA takes a bit of energy away from each racer during a safety car period.

That meant a race whose energy quota was constantly changing. Add to that the fact that Formula E calculates its race lengths as a period of time plus one lap, and the race ended up taking longer than anyone expected. As a result, half of the entrants either ran out of energy or were disqualified for using too much.

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That meant a victory for the cautious Nyck de Vries of Mercedes-EQ. He was followed by Nico Müller of Dragon/Penske Autosport and Stoffel Vandoorne, also of a Mercedes-EQ, who had started the race in last.

The race has drawn criticism for its wild end. Some have compared it to Formula 1’s 2005 Indianapolis Grand Prix, where most of the field failed to finish due to a tire issue. But some, like former champion Lucas di Grassi, say that Saturday’s race was simply a perfect storm of bad luck.

“It was just an outlier that happened once every 1000 races,” he told Motorsport. “The bad thing is that people focus on that.”

Di Grassi admits, though, that the same could have happened on Sunday, were it not for a strategy call from BMW/Andretti Motorsport that ended up benefitting the whole pack.

At the end of the seventh round of the Formula E season, the team asked its driver, Jake Dennis, to slow down. The driver, a rookie, was in the lead and his decision to slow up ended up shortening the race by a lap.

“We were very conservative at one point. Today could have been [similar],” James Barclay, Jaguar Racing team director, told Motorsport. “If [Jake] had have gone one lap longer, potentially a number of cars were in trouble.”

Regardless, de Vries’ Saturday performance means that he leads the series with 57 points, ahead of Mercedes teammate Stoffel Vandoorne. Jaguar’s Sam Bird is in third position after six races.

The series will return to its street circuit racing ways on May 8 for the Monaco ePrix.