Viewers of the latest F1 race will have seen Red Bull’s Sergio Perez lose out to Mercedes’ George Russel after he was caught napping by an unusually long Virtual Safety Car (VSC) period towards the end of the race.
The VSC had been brought out after Alfa Romeo’s Zhou Guanyu stopped at the side of the track with an engine problem.
Once the track was clear, Race Control released a message to let the teams know the VSC period was ending but a glitch meant this didn’t happen within the 10-15 seconds that it's supposed to.
Instead, a second ‘VSC ending’ message was then sent out and the race eventually resumed.
Perez didn’t react quickly enough to the second message however, and Russell passed him almost instantly.
Seemingly forgetting about quite how Red Bull was able to win a Driver’s Championship title in 2021, Perez then said; "I mean it's a shame the virtual safety car interfered with the result, to be honest. It shouldn't be the case, but today it was the case.
“It was totally wrong, there was something going on because it said it was going to end out of Turn 9 and it only ended out of Turn 12."
Red Bull team boss Christian Horner said the important thing was to get an explanation from the FIA about what had gone wrong.
“I think we just want to understand the facts. I’ve just had a chat with Checo, I think we just want to understand because there was some kind of glitch going on with the system.”
A statement from the FIA said: “A second VSC ending message was sent due to a hardware issue, which led to an automated switch to backup systems that worked exactly as they should in that scenario.
“The same information is supplied to all teams concurrently. The VSC ending countdown time to the green light being displayed on the trackside panels is always random.”
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