Valtteri Bottas indicated his wish for Cadillac to investigate a potentially bizarre computer glitch in his car after crashing in the final stages of the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.
The Finn endured a miserable race at the Baku City Circuit, possessed with the equipment to only fight the Aston Martins at the foot of the field.
Bottas was set to make the chequered flag, albeit in the final place in the field of the cars still in race, but crashed at Turn 15, just yards from starting the penultimate lap.
After the race, Bottas theorised that an excursion at Turn 1 earlier in the lap, and the time it took him to rejoin the circuit proper, may have caused the system on his MAC-26 to be effectively baffled.
“First of all, on the same lap, I had a lock-up into Turn 1, I went wide,” he explained. “Then I think the systems got a bit confused, because of the extra distance.
“I had a huge super-clip into [Turn] 15 and then, when I hit the brakes, only the front brakes worked.
“It was almost like I wasn’t harvesting anymore with the rears [tyres], so something [became] a bit confused there. We need to have a look at what happened, but it was an odd one, because it felt like I lost the rear brakes.
“It felt like I lost the rear harvesting.”
Bottas was intrigued enough that he remained at the scene to examine the car, which got him in trouble with the stewards, who investigated him for being in an unsafe place.
The incident will likely spark further debate about the popularity – or lack of – of F1’s regulations, which came into effect this season, due to the increased computersation of th new near 50/50 hybrid power units.
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