Lewis Hamilton has called on his Mercedes team to up their game as the Brackley-based team reveals the cause of their Australian GP defeat.
The world champion was comfortably on course to claim the first win of the 2018 Formula 1 season, but a decision by Sebastian Vettel, who had been running third, to stay out longer before pitting paid dividends as a Virtual Safety Car allowed him to change tyres and stay ahead of the Briton.
From then on, the inability to follow a car closely saw Hamilton unable to challenge the Ferrari and have to settle for a disappointing second, later admitting the loss left him in “disbelief”.
“The issue isn’t really with the race strategy software that we use,” Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin explained in their Pure Pitwall debrief video.
“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.
“That is why we thought we were safe. We thought we had a bit of margin and then you saw the result. We dropped out, we were in second place and it is very difficult to overtake and we couldn’t get through.”
Despite understanding what went wrong, that hasn’t completely satisfied their lead driver, who was also frustrated at the pace with which decisions were being made.
“Communication is something we are obviously going to try and work on,” he said. “I was like ‘Can I fight? can I go?’ and they were taking their time so I was like ‘I am going for it’ and I gave everything in that moment.”
He also revealed part of his thinking behind eventually giving up on a charge at Vettel was the engine restrictions in place for this season.
“I just thought, I couldn’t get him in those other laps, my tyres are going to be worse now, I am driving at 110% and I am risking everything just for that seven points so I probably should just sit back, save my engine and use the life of it for the next ones,” he said.
“That goes against my spirit of racing because I want to race right down to the last line, but the way the sport is set up with fuel saving and all these different things, three engines, you have to think about them and back off.”
