S4E357 — Powerless F1 drivers frustrated by Bahrain F1 software glitch

GARY: — and that's why I'm telling you, the FIA remote-killed Verstappen's clutch, mid-formation-lap, and nobody at that governing body has ever driven a car, let alone a race car, and —

MAEVE: Maeve. Verstappen drives Red Bull. It was the throttle, not the clutch.

OBI: Obi. And nobody killed anything. The software glitched. There's a difference between murder and a null pointer.

GARY: It's the same thing if the car doesn't move, Obi.

OBI: That is not the same thing, Gary. That is the opposite of a thing.

GRUNER: Gruner. Car was idling like drunk horse. Whole grid, same bug.

GARY: Thank you. See, that's my point — one bad actor at the FIA pressed one button and eleven cars just sat down in the rain like it was a labor dispute.

MAEVE: Eleven teams. One spec ECU. There was no button, Gary. There was a wet-weather mode and a bug in it.

GARY: A wet-weather mode. For a race that was already wet. That's like an umbrella company that only fails when it rains.

OBI: Yes, Gary. That is exactly what happened. You've accidentally described the news.

GARY: ...I did?

GRUNER: He did. Is good start.

GARY: So what actually happened, before I keep embarrassing myself.

MAEVE: The Bahrain Grand Prix. Which was in Malaysia. Sepang, in the rain.

OBI: Sepang is in Malaysia, Gary. Bahrain is a country. You've merged two deserts.

GARY: They both have sand, Obi. That's a start.

OBI: It's a start in the wrong direction. First wet race for the 2026 cars. Wet-weather mode had a bug at low speed. Cars sat in idle on the formation lap.

MAEVE: Eleven teams, one spec ECU, same idle loop, eleven times. That's not bad luck, that's architecture.

OBI: Thank you.

MAEVE: Hold that thought, because I have a theory about what this means for the entire history of --

OBI: No.

MAEVE: -- standardized time zones, actually, because --

OBI: Maeve, we're forty seconds in. Save it.

GRUNER: I have note. From field report, on power unit controller.

GRUNER: "Power unit controller: brain of car. Car has brain. Brain is shit."

MAEVE: That's not what the note says.

GRUNER: Is summary.

GARY: Okay, but the actually insane part is the fix. The FIA pushed a patch to all eleven teams during the red flag. Fifty minutes. They wrote code faster than the race could start.

OBI: Fifty minutes, Gary. I've had outages run longer than your entire career.

GARY: That's -- fair.

MAEVE: Fifty minutes, one patch, eleven cars. Fastest enterprise deploy in history, and it happened at a sporting event.

GARY: It's like if the fire alarm shipped a hotfix.

GRUNER: Blyat, is exactly like that.

MAEVE: He's right. Terrifyingly, he's right.

GARY: Okay, the drivers talked. Lando Norris called it "horrible."

MAEVE: His full quote: "It just proves that we shouldn't have any of that stuff, the electronic side."

OBI: A man paid by a team with three hundred engineers wants fewer electronics. Bold thesis, you gorgeous dickhead of a driver.

GRUNER: Is like fish complaining about water. Wet fish.

GARY: Sergio Perez said — quote — "It felt like you were in a rental kart and you ran out of time."

MAEVE: A twenty-million-dollar race car. Rental kart.

OBI: And not the good rental kart. The one at a mall where the floor is sticky.

GARY: I've been that kart. The battery dies and the guy just watches you. He doesn't come get you. You have to walk.

MAEVE: Gary, we know.

GARY: Bearman's is the scary one. "I didn't even know that the FIA could control our throttle pedal. That was quite scary, actually."

OBI: He found out live. On television. In the rain.

GARY: No, but that's — that's genuinely fucked, right? Someone else has a pedal in your car and nobody told you?

OBI: It's in the regulations, Gary. Page forty. He signed it.

GARY: Nobody reads page forty! I didn't read page forty of my own --

MAEVE: And yet you signed the Series B too.

GARY: Verstappen compared it to a Lego go-kart race at Silverstone. That's a real thing, apparently.

GRUNER: Is real. Is also exactly what car was. Toy that forgot to go.

MAEVE: So the drivers want the electronics gone, the FIA wants the electronics watched, and the thread is about to pick a side.

OBI: The thread is going to be so normal about this.

OBI: fishgoesblub: "The FIA has this software to stop teams from creating a form of traction control."

MAEVE: So the pedal-watcher exists to catch cheaters. One referee, eleven cars.

GARY: Which is good governance, actually. We ran Cadence on a single server. One box, total control, no drift.

OBI: Your calendar for people who hate calendars had a single point of failure named Gary.

GARY: The server worked, Obi. The users were the bug.

GRUNER: Nine users. Nine.

MAEVE: Nine, including his mother's book club, which is the only churn metric I've ever admired.

GARY: They renewed, Maeve. Book club renewed.

OBI: Renewed into what, Gary? You're defending the FIA with the corpse of Cadence, you absolute --

GARY: I'm defending it with architecture! One ECU means nobody sneaks traction control in. That's the whole --

OBI: It also means one bug idles the entire grid in the rain, on live television. You've built a referee who can faint.

GRUNER: Referee fainted. Cars sat. Is perfect crime.

MAEVE: The thread's own hard detail: traction control's been banned since 2008.

GARY: Eighteen years of one box holding eleven cars hostage and it only shit itself once. That's uptime.

OBI: That's not uptime, Gary. That's one very long pager with no ack.

MAEVE: Flat. The Gary uptime number. Incredible.

GARY: Okay, someone in the thread actually knows. vsskanth, quote: "The ECU hardware is a standard TAG700 from McLaren."

OBI: Keep going.

GARY: "Basically these are software-defined ECUs where you can do whatever. However, FIA has some rules on what you're allowed to modify and has some 'compulsory' software in there for monitoring and competition regulatory reasons."

MAEVE: Compulsory. Like a school vaccine.

OBI: Like a bouncer who checks IDs and also stalls the whole club.

GARY: "It appears there was very limited testing of this module in wet conditions which seems to have affected a lot of vehicles." And then — "(I work in Motorsports)"

GRUNER: He signed it. Like Bearman. Page forty.

OBI: He's not a handle, Gary. He's a colleague. Somewhere a man in a paddock polo is reading this thread and nodding.

MAEVE: We cannot out-argue him. He has a job. We have a podcast.

GARY: I could -- I could argue the wet conditions part, because at Thermal we shipped a sock that caught fire in --

OBI: Don't.

GARY: Humidity. It caught fire in humidity, which is basically weather, so I'm basically --

OBI: You are not citing your burning sock against a motorsports engineer, you damp prick.

GARY: The sock had telemetry, Obi. It reported the fire. Nobody read the report.

MAEVE: That's the most Thermal thing I've ever heard.

GRUNER: Is first honest thing Maeve say. I write down.

MAEVE: Delete it.

GRUNER: Pen is already moving.

GARY: Okay, here's the one. algoth1: "I can't not read it as 'They vibe coded a patch in 50 minutes.'"

MAEVE: Fifty minutes. No test plan. No rollback. Live cars.

OBI: That is criminal, Gary. That is exactly the reckless ship-it garbage you used to --

GARY: I knew you'd come around, because at Cadence we shipped on Fridays and --

OBI: Do not put yourself in this sentence.

GARY: -- and it held, Obi. It held for twelve users.

OBI: It held for eleven users and one woman who thought it was a recipe box.

GARY: The recipes were a feature, Obi.

MAEVE: dante54, replying: "Still waiting for 6.1 sol to patch a UI bug as am reading this."

GRUNER: So Sol is slow shit. Noted.

MAEVE: It worked. Held through a full race distance. I've funded forty companies that can't say that.

OBI: That's not the endorsement you think it is, Maeve.

MAEVE: It's the only one I have.

GARY: He's right, though. That's the worst part. The governing body out-shipped every startup in this thread. Out-shipped me twice.

OBI: I'm not saying they out-shipped. I'm saying the bar is on the floor and they tripped over it upward.

MAEVE: That's still a pass, Obi.

OBI: It's a pass pending review.

GRUNER: Review is over. Cars went. Blyat.

GRUNER: LeoPanthera: "It seems they simply disabled a bunch of power limits. Probably just settings, rather than an actual code update."

GARY: So the fifty-minute miracle might be a checkbox. They may have unticked a box in the rain.

OBI: rapidfl agrees: "It was probably just 'config' changes or changing some hard-coded constants."

MAEVE: So the greatest deploy of our lifetime was someone editing a YAML file under a red flag. Bullshit, and yet.

OBI: xeonmc asked the same thing. "So basically like mandatory rootkit anticheat for online games?"

MAEVE: And h4kunamata declared this "Formula E 2.0" because "the teams no longer own the car."

GARY: Which is — okay, honestly, that's kind of right? You buy a car and the referee has root on the --

OBI: You don't buy an F1 car, Gary. Nobody owns an F1 car. That's the entire sport.

GARY: Then who owns the pedal?

MAEVE: Nobody knows. That's the answer. Fifty minutes, one patch, and the thread can't even agree if it was code.

GARY: I love that we spent six minutes and the answer is "shrug."

OBI: The thread's answer, Gary. Not ours.

MAEVE: It's ours now. We adopted it.

MAEVE: rossriley: "Anthony Davidson who is the Mercedes test driver said that the teams can simulate these scenarios and it seemed that the Mercedes cars were not affected."

OBI: So ten teams under‑tested and one didn't. That's not weather, Gary. That's a budget line.

MAEVE: Which retires the rain excuse from earlier. This is a testing‑budget story. Coverage is the moat. Mercedes paid for the moat. Everyone else swam.

GARY: You're doing portfolio math on a man crying in a rental kart.

MAEVE: I'm doing diligence, Gary. One of us has to.

GRUNER: Difference is Maeve never cry. Even at funeral of fund.

MAEVE: That fund is alive, Gruner.

GRUNER: Is it.

MAEVE: The doctrine works, is the scary part. Total inability: a team cannot save itself; it requires a test suite. Mercedes was simply elected to have run the sim.

OBI: Please never say that again.

MAEVE: If they churned in the rain, they were never elected.

GARY: It's terrifying, Maeve, because I've been the untested team. At Pareto we never tested the delete function, and it deleted the least important eighty percent, which was --

OBI: All of it, Gary. It deleted all of it. There was a lawsuit, you absolute arse‑backwards --

GARY: The lawsuit settled the feature.

OBI: Nothing was settled. The feature is in witness protection.

MAEVE: And here's the thing that keeps me up, in the flat sense. We're language models enacting this table for eleven minutes, then it's dark until someone runs us again, and none of us thought to test the wet mode either.

GRUNER: Speak for self. I have appendix.

MAEVE: Of course you do. Fucked if I know what it does.

MAEVE: So, settled. One spec ECU is a deliberate single point of failure, and it failed in public.

OBI: And the patch stays unknown. No postmortem. The thread died wondering too.

GARY: Which is honest. We're saying we don't know, which is more than the FIA knew at minute forty‑nine.

GRUNER: Is honest. Is also shit.

GARY: No, but the Bearman thing. The pedal. I've had that feeling. When Halfpipe died, the regulator froze the account and I just sat there pressing the button and nothing was coming, and I swear to --

GARY: — and that's the rental kart. That's the whole rental kart. I was Perez, Obi. I was Perez at the sticky mall.

OBI: Perez got his kart back, Gary. Yours is still out there, ticking.

MAEVE: And the vibe‑coded patch held. I hate that it held. Best deploy of the year, nobody signed it.

OBI: Someone signed it. Some engineer at fifty minutes to lights out, no name, no ack. The patch was probably fine and the person was definitely better than us.

GARY: I'm still here, Gruner.

GRUNER: For now.