Why DRS did not work at the Abu Dhabi GP

FIA race director Michael Masi explained that a server crash was behind the 18-lap wait for DRS to be enabled during the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.

Drivers were forced to make overtakes without the aid of extra speed from DRS in the early part of the race, something that not all viewing fans had a particular problem with.

Masi said that DRS had to be switched off for all drivers in order to avoid a "free for all".

"The simple part is that it was a server data crash. There's a whole lot of separate things but it was basically a server data crash," he said.

"So the times still operated fine like we all saw. That crashed, and immediately we disabled it. Until we were 100 per cent confident that it was not only back up and running, but back up and running with the correct data available, that was when we re-enabled it.

"We ran various checks working between the FIA and the F1 Group to make sure everything was working hunky-dory. We were not going to take that chance until we were confident.

"The DRS signals that were going to the cars, effectively there wasn't a confident feed that we could rely upon. We disabled it globally, so it wouldn't have been a free-for-all.

"The exact impacts, I prefer not to think about. But the precautionary measure straight away was to do a global disabling.

"There is a back-up but the first part is to actually identify what the first issue was, and as we all know with back-up systems, there is a lag in things clicking over."

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