Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton have compared the effects of a software bug affecting several cars ahead of the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia to a “Lego race”.
The problem led to several cars, including those of the two multiple world champions who shared the front row of the grid, failing to run in the wet conditions leading up to the race.
A tropical downpour delayed attempts to start the Grand Prix for almost an hour. And when the cars set off on formation laps behind a safety car to test the conditions, the audience was treated to the eerie sight of many of them struggling to move.
A bug in the software that specifies how the motors’ electrical power can be used in wet conditions was triggered by a combination of low engine speeds, low grip and specific aspects of the circuit layout.
Verstappen, who scored a dominant victory which was his first victory of the year, said: “These engines are so complicated and there is a lot of software implemented.
“First I triggered (the problem), then I looked in my mirror, I was like, ‘Wait, are they waiting for me or what’s going on…?’ It was like racing for Legos.”
Verstappen was referring to a show of battery-powered Lego F1 cars held before the British Grand Prix in July.
Hamilton, sitting next to Verstappen at the post-race press conference after finishing third, interjected to say: “Yes, we had the same speed. I had to stop on the track, stop the car and the engine and restart them. I’ve never done that before.”
Verstappen added: “It was crazy. It’s like the power of Lego. At one point there were five of us on the straight because we couldn’t understand what was happening.”
“Then we went around and then I saw eight other cars crawling again, and I saw you (Hamilton) all alone crawling. That’s not what you want, is it, for sport.”
Mercedes driver George Russell, who retired from the race due to engine failure, said: “It didn’t feel like F1.”
Nikolas Tombazis, director of single-seaters at the FIA governing body, said a full investigation would be carried out.
The problem arises, he added, because although the software has been tested, it has not been tested under these specific conditions. Largely because there have been so few races in the wet this year.
“Cars are complicated,” Tombazis said. “We would all like it to be simpler, but when electrical energy and combustion energy work together, and obviously when you want to guarantee sporting fairness between teams, it is complicated.
“We haven’t done a full debriefing of the situation and we haven’t seen how we can avoid such a problem. Every race we have a long debriefing afterwards, where we identify the critical points.”
“This was obviously a major flashpoint, and we need to make sure we avoid it. Can I guarantee it won’t happen again? This specific problem, yes. A problem, no, but we’ll do our best to avoid it, of course.”
This is far from the first problem created by the enormous complexity of the latest hybrid engines introduced this year, with a near 50-50 split between internal combustion and electric power.
Since the motors are fundamentally starved of power and therefore cannot deploy their full combined power at all times, a series of complexities have been added to the management of the motors in an attempt to find sticky plaster solutions.
Many of them led to counterintuitive driving that many sports stars have complained about all season – and more changes have been added since.
Off-track conversations have been dominated by this topic all year, and the rules are changing for next year to change the distribution of energies and try to improve the problem.
Andrea Stella, McLaren team principal, said: “What happened at the start is obviously not ideal in terms of presenting the sport.
“But at the same time this is the first year of new regulations, quite complex from a regulatory point of view, and it was also the first time that we started under such conditions.
“So we have to admit that F1 has done an excellent job in coming up with new regulations that have question marks from a powertrain behavior perspective, for example in racing.”
“We have to recognize that there has been a really good job of making the show and the racing work, and if there are problems from time to time, we have to accept that these are problems for everyone, be united and make sure that it doesn’t happen again.
The problem had a secondary consequence: the order of the fields was confused, and a single reading of the rules could have meant that the order of the grid had to change on every restart.
But while FIA software engineers rewrote the code as quickly as possible, it was determined that because this situation had never happened before and the problem was beyond a competitor’s control, the most appropriate order was to revert to the original grid.
Mercedes deputy team principal Bradley Lord said: “If you think about the millions of people watching around the world, they tune in for the start and all of a sudden the cars are all in a jumbled order because of something that happened 40 minutes earlier and they were behind a safety car on a formation lap. That would have been a much harder thing to explain than resetting and then starting from where we did.”
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