The inaugural one-hour practice session at Albert Park was halted after 40 minutes when it emerged that the teams were failing to track the cars around the circuit and as a result, several crashes occurred.
The FIA then decided to interrupt the session for nine minutes to investigate the issue.
It quickly became apparent that the lack of real-time GPS tracking was creating the major safety issue, with drivers oblivious to cars either appearing behind them at high speed or slowly creeping ahead of them. This was because the teams had lost the ability to observe what their rivals were doing at that stage, thus being unable to provide information to the drivers, as is normally the case during practice and qualifying sessions.
But Motorsport.com has learned that the root cause of the problem was not a fault in the GPS system used by F1, which remained active for the FIA’s monitoring systems in race control.
On the other hand, a failure occurred in an FIA server which manages tire data and distributes this information to the live timing systems and in television graphics.
Once the root problem had been resolved, the FIA was able to restart FP1, which in the end saw Max Verstappen finish in the lead with Red Bull.
Discussing the situation after Friday’s wet FP2 session, several drivers agreed with the FIA’s decision to interrupt FP1 due to a lack of GPS data for the teams.
“It’s a bit complicated, of course,” said Alfa Romeo’s Valtteri Bottas.
“It depends on the track, but when there’s a lot of traffic and half the field is on a fast lap and half on a slow lap, then it’s a bit blind. So, I think it’s a bit of a safety issue.”
“I think it would be manageable (without the teams having GPS positioning information), but there is an added risk factor: someone going slow into a blind curve and someone running flat out with no information.”
Nyck de Vries, AlphaTauri AT04
Photo by: Lionel Ng / Motorsport Images
Nyck de Vries said he thought it was “quite wise of them (the FIA) to red-flag because the speeds are high and everyone was so out of sync. And then the visibility is poor,” added the Dutchman.
“And when you’re always relying on the team and your engineer to inform you about gaps and then suddenly they’re unable to inform you, you can find yourself in a difficult situation, as we’ve seen.”
“There’s not a lot of room (at Albert Park), it’s relatively narrow and the track is always almost one continuous curve, so even in the mirrors it’s pretty blind.
“There aren’t many long straights, so to speak, except at Turn 1.”
“Then I think the nature of the tires, that they keep getting better, causes people to stop, continue and then find themselves out of sync and with different ride plans, and then hit traffic.”
According to Motorsport.com, a failure of the F1 starting lights during the second Supercars race of the week in Melbourne after FP1 was unrelated to the issue that prevented GPS data from reaching the F1 teams.
