Russell penalty ‘harsh, he left more than enough room’

In brief

Mercedes criticise “harsh” penalty for Russell

Russell was given a five-second time penalty, and two endorsement points on his superlicence, for his first-lap tangle with Perez. However Mercedes’ head of trackside engineering Andrew Shovlin took issue 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 hope to recover Norris’s failed power unit

Lando Norris stopped on track during first practice at the Red Bull Ring with a power unit problem, prompting McLaren to revert to older hardware.

“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 said that Alfa Romeo have not kept pace with the development rate of their rivals.

“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.”

Alfa Romeo failed to add to their points tally in Austria. “It’s not good but we tried,” said Bottas. “I pretty quickly realised I was stuck behind the DRS train in the beginning.

“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.”