What looked to be a potentially comfortable victory for Lewis Hamilton top open the season, turned into a disappointing second place for the British driver after Sebastian Vettel's decision to pit under the virtual safety car saw him gain time and take the lead.

Vettel's actions caught out Mercedes, whose race strategy software reported Hamilton was close enough to retake the lead once the Ferrari had stopped.

A glitch in the race strategy software was suspected to be the culprit initially, however, after concluding a post-race investigation into the incident, Mercedes found the problem was caused by an offline tool used to calculate the delta times the drivers must stick to between cars staying out on track and those coming into the pits during safety car phases.

In the latest episode of its Pure Pitwall race debrief, Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin said action was being taken to ensure the situation never happened again.

"The issue isn't really with the race strategy software that we use," he explained.

"It was an offline tool that we create these delta lap times with, and we found a bug in that tool that meant that it gave us the wrong number.

"The number that we were calculating was around 15 seconds, and in reality the number was slightly short of 13 seconds, so that was what created our delta.

"That is why we thought we were safe. We thought we had a bit of margin and then you saw the result.

"We dropped out, we were in second place and it is very difficult to overtake and we couldn't get through."

Shovlin said the situation is being treated with the same seriousness as a reliability issue would be, and steps are being made to ensure the same problem doesn't re-surface in the future.

"It is really about understanding everything that went wrong, gathering all the data, and invariably it is never just one thing," he said.

"So there are elements that we can do better with calculating that, but we have also looked at it for future.

"We are going to make sure we have more margin because we want to be able to cover for Vettel doing an amazingly good in lap to the pits, or having an incredibly fast stop.

"So with any of these things, we look at what went wrong, work out how to solve it and then put the processes in place to make sure we don't have a repeat."

Added VSC complication is caused by drivers being allowed to accelerate from the safety car line before the pits until they hit the pitlane speed limit.

Shovlin added: "It is never quite an exact science because you don't know how fast a car is going to be able to come through that pit entry."