Haas team principal Guenther Steiner revealed after the British Grand Prix that the team suffered a complete loss of power to all of its systems for around 10 laps during the race, which it believes cost it a better result.
The power failure resulted in the loss of GPS track data, telemetry and radio communication during the second round of pit stops and the engineers went into "panic" mode according to Steiner.
"We had a problem with our electricity," he said, "everything went down, we had no data, nothing available to the engineers because everything went down.
"You cannot concentrate on the car anymore but you try to fix it to get your telemetry back. We lost a bit of time there because Esteban [Gutierrez] then came in a lap late for going to dry [tyres], because it was [during] that period.
"We couldn’t speak properly because we had no GPS, we lost radio then we had transmission failure with Romain [Grosjean]."
The team managed to find the cause of the problem and swiftly resolved it, but the damage to their race had already been done with Gutierrez losing time, eventually finishing 16th.
"It was loss of power with the system, it just went down, we found out what exactly happened and then we were switched on again," added Steiner.
"I think we were about 6-10 laps without electricity, engineers start to panic when they have no telemetry."