REVEALED: The Bug That Cost Mercedes in Australia

Mercedes have found the software bug that essentially cost them the Australian Grand Prix, saying that it was an offline computer bug that caused the team to miscalculate its lap times.

Lewis Hamilton saw a comfortable lead disappear like snow before the sun on Albert Park under the Virtual Safety Car. Sebastian Vettel pitted and came out just before the Brit was able to pass. 

"What happened guys?" Hamilton immediately asked over the team radio, leaving the team speechless. The team's race strategy software said that the W09 was close enough to retake the lead when Vettel pitted. The team had suspicions that the error was in that race strategy, but now it's been revealed that is was offline software that had a glitch.

In the latest episode of Pure Pitwall race debrief, a series on Mercedes' YouTube channel, trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin revealed that it was the offline tool that calculates delta times between cars in the pits and cars on the track caused the issue. Shovlin also vowed that this would never happen again.

“The issue isn’t really with the race strategy software that we use,” Shovlin explained.

“It was an offline tool that we create these delta lap times with, and we found a bug in that tool that meant that it gave us the wrong number."

“The number that we were calculating was around 15 seconds, and in reality, the number was slightly short of 13 seconds, so that was what created our delta." 

The engineer then said that an issue like this would never happen again.

"With any of these things, we look at what went wrong, work out how to solve it and then put the processes in place to make sure we don’t have a repeat.”

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