Software glitch lets Lewis down

Mercedes said yesterday a software glitch may have cost world champion Lewis Hamilton victory after Sebastian Vettel’s Ferrari won the Formula One season-opening Australian Grand Prix.

Hamilton was in control of the race until Romain Grosjean’s Haas stopped on track and officials imposed a Virtual Safety Car (VSC), which restricts the pace of the cars on track.

The VSC caused the field to slow while Vettel, who was leading courtesy of Hamilton’s earlier stop, dived into the pits for fresh tyres and lost less time than under normal race conditions.

It meant Vettel emerged from the pits marginally in front of a startled Hamilton and held his lead to the chequered flag for his third Australian GP victory.

“What just happened guys?” Hamilton queried his Mercedes team over radio during the race. “Why didn’t you tell me Vettel was in the pits?

“We thought we were safe, but there’s obviously something wrong,” the team replied.

“Did I do anything wrong? Should I have gone faster?” Hamilton pressed further.

Mercedes team chief Toto Wolff said they would launch an investigation.

“It’s very hard to take because we had the pace. For whatever reason, we need to find out, we lost the win,” Wolff told Sky F1.

“We thought we had about three seconds margin. I don’t know what happened to them, we need to ask the computers and that’s what we are doing. Whether we had a software problem somewhere, we need to fix it.

“I think the problem is within our systems. I think we have a bug somewhere that said 15 seconds is what you need, we had 12. It should have been enough but it wasn’t.”

Mercedes’ former world champion Nico Rosberg said he was staggered by the team’s software problems.

“It’s unbelievable that Mercedes had a software glitch of five seconds. Five seconds is the world out there in F1. It’s a huge one and it cost them the win,” he said. – AFP