F1 in Britain: Automated software to blame for crushing expectations

Much had been expected of a newly upgraded Ferrari engine in Austria, but a combination of altitude and heat meant we did not see it at its best. With thicker, cooler air, the gap to the Mercedes was much less, and an inspired lap from Hamilton, egged on by more than 100,000 spectators, saw him grab the sprint pole from Mercedes’ Kimi Antonelli by 11 milliseconds. The following day, Hamilton managed to keep the young Mercedes driver at bay and held out for eight laps before the inevitable happened. But Hamilton still finished second, and less than 3 seconds back after 17 laps. That’s much less of a deficit than we’ve seen before. That afternoon saw qualifying for Sunday’s race, but this time Hamilton could only manage third on the grid. Antonelli snatched pole, but between them was Charles Leclerc, Hamilton’s teammate at Ferrari. Leclerc has been ill at ease with his race car, and if you’re not comfortable in an F1 car, you won’t find its limit. He failed to finish in Monaco and Barcelona and finished a distant eighth in Austria, albeit after qualifying second. This past weekend looked like that trend might continue, until something finally clicked between Leclerc and his Ferrari SF-26. Both Ferraris made better starts than Antonelli with Leclerc in the lead. And this is what happened to Verstappen in qualifying in Austria, and now again during the race in Britain. The four-time champion had been in an engaging battle with the other Mercedes of Russell and the Ferrari of Hamilton up until this point; now speculation is stronger than ever that he might walk away from the sport at the end of the season to go GT3 racing instead. The safety car came out to allow the Red Bull to be recovered from the gravel trap it was parked in. With just four laps remaining, there was every prospect of the race finishing under caution as there wouldn’t be time to reorder the cars and then conduct a restart. Indeed, the rules state that one lap must be completed behind the safety car after the lapped cars are allowed to unlap themselves, and this only happened on lap 51. Leclerc took the win ahead of Russell and Hamilton, who swapped positions when the Ferrari made a pit stop, but the Mercedes didn’t when the safety car came out. Unfortunately, the unlapping command also caused an automated message to show up announcing that the safety car would be in that lap, meaning a one-lap race to the end with shades of the title-deciding fiasco in Abu Dhabi 2021 (when the rules weren’t followed). But there was never an actual command issued from race control to bring in the safety car, and not enough time to bring the race back to green, and the automated message was erroneous. Eight seconds later, it was replaced by “safety car deployed” again.