After Guanyu Zhou stopped at the side of the track with an engine problem in the final laps of the French GP, the FIA instituted a virtual safety car period to allow the stewards to attend and remove the disabled car from the track. .
Once the track was clear, race control sent a message to the teams to inform them that the virtual safety car period was ending.
According to F1’s Sporting Regulations , the race is supposed to go back to green (resume) “anytime between 10 and 15 seconds after” the warning, and that’s when drivers can start racing again.
However, that did not happen immediately this Sunday at the Paul Ricard and the race remained under virtual safety car conditions for a longer time.
A second ‘VSC end’ message was then sent and the race finally resumed, but this delay caused some drivers to be confused, including Sergio Pérez, who was surprised by the moment the race got underway from new.
There the Mexican was overtaken by George Russell while recovering normal speed, and lost the podium. Then, before the media, he declared: “I want to say that it is a pity that the virtual safety car has interfered with the result, to be honest. It should not be like that, but today it was.”
“That message was totally wrong [the message that the VSC was over], something was happening because it said it was going to finish at turn 9 and it ended at turn 12.
But the FIA has explained that the delay in restarting the race was due to problems with its computer system, forcing it to resort to the support system if the normal one fails.
That worked as planned, but it was already late and the race had already resumed.
The FIA statement said: “A second VSC ending message was sent due to a hardware problem, which led to an automatic switch to backup systems which worked exactly as intended in that scenario.”
“The same information is supplied to all teams simultaneously. The time from the VSC completion countdown until the green light is displayed on the track panels is always random.”
Red Bull team principal Christian Horner was not particularly upset about this, but said the most important thing was to get an explanation from the FIA as to what had gone wrong.
“I think we just want to understand the facts,” he said. “I just had a talk with Checo, I think we just want to understand it, because there was some kind of glitch in the system.”
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