AustrianGrand Prix

Bruising Sunday ends a difficult weekend in Spielberg

• Lewis Hamilton finished seventh and George Russell eighth in the Austrian Grand Prix.

• Lining up P5 and P11 respectively, both Lewis and George began the race on the medium compound tyre, with Lewis gaining a position on the opening lap to move up to P4.

• Both drivers took advantage of a Virtual Safety Car period on lap 14 to switch onto the hard compound tyre, gaining a few positions in the process.

• As the second stint wore on, Lewis and George battled hard against cars with superior race pace with Lewis being given a five-second time penalty for track limits infringements.

• George made his second stop on lap 42 for the medium tyre, with Lewis doing so a lap later and serving his penalty. As the second stops cycled through, Lewis held P7 and George P8, positions they would keep until the chequered flag.

• After a tough weekend, focus moves immediately to next weekend’s British Grand Prix at Silverstone.

George Russell

It was really challenging today, and our pace was not as we expected. After yesterday, I was hoping for a little bit more from the Grand Prix. I am sure we will go away and get to the bottom of our performance here. We have the same car that we had in Barcelona where we were flying so we need to understand what went wrong on our side. The car certainly doesn’t feel how we want it to at the moment. It’s moving around a lot, and it felt a little bit worse this weekend than at other circuits; the pace was substantially worse though, so we need to get to the bottom of that.

Our performance is clearly circuit dependent now. We were nowhere here but good in Montreal and Barcelona. That bodes well for Silverstone as that is a circuit more similar to Barcelona than Austria, so we’re excited for next weekend’s British Grand Prix. We will be aiming to come back stronger.

Andrew Shovlin, Trackside Engineering Director

There’s lots for us to improve on leaving here. The performance clearly hasn’t been good enough; we need to understand how much is down to not landing the set-up in the right place and how much is just base performance. We’ve not brought any updates to the last few races, so it’s also possible we’re lacking development. We’ve got plans in place to address that but the gap to Ferrari was certainly a worry today.

The situation with track limits was difficult; the notifications were coming in after the fact, so Lewis ended up with a penalty before we could do anything about it. We’re happy that we’ve only got to wait a few days before getting back on track. We need to work hard to understand the areas that need improvement, but we’re looking forward to Silverstone and putting this race behind us.