The FIA has again owned up to its human error at Formula 1’s Singapore Grand Prix, with its single-seater director Nikolas Tombazis describing it as “the worst thing” for the federation.
After sprint qualifying was red-flagged following Sergio Perez’s crash, the end of SQ1 was impacted by race control first failing to reactivate overtake mode, then turning it back on for 27 seconds and deactivating it again.
Drivers were puzzled by the lack of power, and those who were eliminated in that first phase of sprint qualifying felt they unfairly came off worse.
Speaking to Sky Germany, Tombazis pointed out “there’s a lot of things happening in race control simultaneously” and explained how the mistake happened.
“Normally it is a manual process to re-enable it, because clearly when it gets re-enabled we want to make sure from a safety point of view it’s okay to do so,” he detailed.
“Unfortunately, there was a pop-up window that came on somebody’s computer that was not acted on quickly enough or when it should have. And then under the time pressure and the general other pressure, this was forgotten, unfortunately.
Sergio Perez, Cadillac Racing
Photo by: Clive Rose / Formula 1 via Getty Images
“We then went into quite an intense analysis about, was there some other issue, because we could hear, of course, the drivers complaining and saying what’s happening. We realised where the problem was.
“At that time there was an erroneous decision to briefly turn it on again, but that was sort of not exactly the correct decision in order for fairness. And then it was turned off again.”
Tombazis went on to admit the situation was “a bit of a mess, quite frankly”, given its impact on the competitive order.
“We’re not happy about it, because it affected some drivers more and some drivers less,” he added.
“So as a result, just in the first session of the sprint, we felt this problem interfered with the results – which for us as FIA is probably, in some ways, the worst thing, because our top priorities are always safety and fairness.
“Of course, to have a situation where a result is not fair or incorrect is for us not good. Of course, it is a complicated job, and people do make mistakes, and we need to be conscious of that. But we also need, when we do make mistakes, to analyse them and to make sure they don’t happen again – which is what we’re doing.”
This blunder occurred less than a week after the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia was disrupted by a power unit glitch for a number of competitors, which required the software to be updated on all cars before the race could get under way.
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