Shovlin: We were lulled into a false sense of security

The team returned to their base and have since discovered that the problem was not specific to the race strategy software that the team uses while conceding that they erred on the side of caution during the race and admitting they were caught off guard by Ferrari's quick thinking with regards to Sebastian Vettel's strategy.

Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin said in his Pure-Pitwall debrief of the incident during the race in Melbourne, “The issue isn't actually with the race strategy software that we use, it was an offline tool that we create these delta lap times with and we found a bug in that tool that meant that it gave us the wrong number."

"The number that we were calculating was around 15 seconds and in reality, the number was slightly short of 13 seconds, so that was what created our delta."

“And that's why we thought we were safe, we thought we had a bit of margin and then obviously you saw the result. We dropped out, we were in second place and it is very difficult to overtake and we couldn't get through.”

“It is really just about understanding everything that went wrong, gathering all the data, invariably it is never just one thing. So there are elements that we can do better with calculating that, but for the future, we are going to make sure we have more margin because we want to be able to cover for Vettel doing an amazingly good in-lap to the pits, or having an incredibly fast stop."

“So with any of these things, we look at what went wrong, work out how to solve it and then put the processes in place to make sure we don't have a repeat.”

At the same time, Shovlin conceded, "We could have pushed the car harder. At this point in the race, we were still following a fuel profile that meant we were having to do same saving of fuel - Melbourne is a very difficult race to do in that 105-kilogram limit."

"Also we were being a bit cautious with the tyres, because the team thought we were safe anyway thinking Sebastian was going to drop behind us, we weren't telling Lewis to push any harder and that is really one of the big frustrations that we have coming away from Melbourne the car was clearly quick enough to win the race.

"If we had managed the race differently we could have won it but at this point, we were lulled into a false sense of security and we didn't have Lewis driving as fast as he could," revealed Shovlin.