“The change for this year’s regulation was that the big board on the start gantry is the official signal. Valtteri got the chequered flag on that and everyone thereafter received it.

“Until we could confirm that Valtteri had actually received it, a couple of teams came on the radio and they were advised to continue racing to the scheduled distance.

“So system error. What the exact part of it [was] I can’t tell you here and now. It’s something that we'll look at and obviously rectify.”

Asked if he believed the issue was down to human error or a systems fault, Masi replied: “There’s actually an element of both in there.

“That’s why we’ve just got to look at exactly what happened, reconstruct it and go from there.

“We’ll have a look at what it is and it’s very unfortunate. I’ll be the first one to say that.

“We pride ourselves on doing things perfectly but it’s one of those that hasn’t happened before with the chequered flag board and we’ve got to investigate why.”