Toto Wolff has pinned Lewis Hamilton's defeat at the Australian Grand Prix on a system bug after the Briton was beaten to victory by Sebastian Vettel at the opening round of the season.
Hamilton started the race from pole position and led for the first half before pitting on lap 19 to cover Kimi Raikkonen, who was using the undercut strategy.
This allowed Vettel to gain the lead while Hamilton rejoined in second before a virtual safety car was deployed for Romain Grosjean who had stopped on the exit of Turn 2.
Pitting under the safety car, Vettel rejoined in the lead to the surprise of Mercedes and held off Hamilton to take victory.
"It's very hard to take because we had the pace and for whatever reason we need to find out [how] we lost the win," Wolff told Sky Sports post-race.
“We thought we had about three seconds margin… I don’t know, we need to ask the computer so that’s what we are doing at the moment and we need to, whether we have a software problem somewhere, we need to fix it.”
When asked if Hamilton had made a mistake under the virtual safety car, failing to match the delta time, Wolff replied:
"No no no, absolutely, I think that the problem is within our system. I think that we have a bug somewhere that told us that we have… 15 seconds is what you need and we had 12. It should have been enough but it wasn’t.”
Despite being close to Vettel in the dying stages of the race, Hamilton finished just over five seconds adrift of the four-time champion, and Wolff pinned the gap on tyre degradation when asked if the reigning champion had "waved the white flag" in defeat:
"I mean he was attacking flat out and you can see that the overtaking is very bad here even the moment you come in even Max [Verstappen] or Lewis [Hamilton], the mega overtakers couldn’t make a pass and he tried hard but at a certain stage he had to give up because the tyres wouldn’t have made it to the end,” he added.
