Mercedes criticize the penalty issued to George Russell for his collision with Sergio Perez in the opening lap of the Austrian Grand Prix.
Mercedes criticize Russell's "harsh" punishment.
For his first-lap collision with Perez, Russell was handed a five-second time penalty and two endorsement points on his superlicense. Andrew Shovlin, head of trackside engineering for Mercedes, disagreed with the decision.
“We felt that George’s penalty for the incident with Sergio was harsh,” he said. “He was up on the apex kerb and left more than enough room.” After fitting a replacement front wing to his car, Russell took fourth behind team mate Lewis Hamilton,a result Shovlin called “very satisfying.”
McLaren hopes to salvage Norris's failing engine.
Lando Norris' power unit malfunctioned during the first practice session at the Red Bull Ring, forcing McLaren to switch to outdated technology.
“The power unit that failed on Lando’s side on Friday was a brand new one and was his third one,” team principal Andreas Seidl confirmed. “Analysis is still ongoing on Mercedes side and the [High-Performance Powertrains] side at the moment and hopefully we’ll stay in a position to recover the power unit and get it in a better place again.
“It wasn’t ideal that he had to go back to the old power unit but that was the team’s solution on Friday,” explained Seidl. “Power units are losing a bit of power with every mileage but at the same time, it allowed us to perform as we did this weekend.”
‘Williams faster than us in Austria’ – Bottas
Valtteri Bottas stated that Alfa Romeo has fallen behind its competitors in terms of technological advancement.
“Some teams clearly have made progress like for example Williams,” said Bottas. “This weekend they seem better than they have been and Alpine, McLaren were a little bit faster than us. But that was not the case in Silverstone. So we need to keep progressing."
In Austria, Alfa Romeo failed to increase their point total. Bottas stated, "It's not good, but we did our best." "I quickly realized that I was initially caught behind the DRS train.
“So that’s why we stopped, tried to find some clean air and went to like kind of a hard-hard [tyre strategy]. I think it was the right thing to do, but just didn’t have quite enough pace and Fernando [Alonso] got that one point from me in the last lap with fresh tyres and that was annoying.”
