Da Costa takes blame for Sims clash

Antonio Felix da Costa wanted to find a deep hole to hide in

Antonio Felix da Costa says he or his teammate Alexander Sims would have won the ABB FIA Formula E Marrakech E-Prix and blames himself for the contact between the BMW Andretti teammates that ruined it all.

When asked about the incident by Autosport, da Costa accepted the blame for the incident.

"I'm sorry – that's a mistake and a mistake coming from me only," he said.

"[It's] terribly frustrating in this story because we lost a win, we lost a one-two, and even if it was just me, Alex could have won the race.

"But because of that, I denied him the win, denied the team a one-two. I'm feeling very bad for myself."

Da Costa also conceded that Sims was the quicker of the two drivers on the day, and felt that he should have yielded the lead.

"He was [quicker] today, especially at that point [the collision]," he said. "In the last 15 laps he was building an edge on me, he had more pace than me.

"I should have accepted that and let him go. I didn't.

"The outcome is a combination of many situations that happened in the 40 minutes that we raced.

"When [it] happened, I wanted to find the deepest hole in Marrakech and put myself in it."

da Costa leads Sims as they pull away from the field

"We all need to learn and work together," he told Autosport. "At that point, I think I had more energy than Antonio by a decent amount, but I just didn't communicate my feelings with the team well enough.

"Antonio and I get on, it's not like there's a breakdown in our relationship and we're good friends, and we didn't want this situation to happen obviously.

"But we'll learn from it and move on."

Both drivers reckoned BMW could have considered employing team orders in a bid to preserve the leading positions.

"Why that situation happened, I'll talk about it with the team later – I would not have minded a team order to tell me to let him go," said da Costa.

"I would not have enjoyed [that], but I think that would have been the thing to do. Again, we will talk internally now and go from there.

"We're a team, we're very strong together and I normally put my hand up for mistakes, so I'm putting my hand up for my bit."

Sims added: "I think there probably would have been [team orders]. That's something we need to learn."