George Russell disagrees with fine

In Austria, Lewis Hamilton continued his hit streak – the Mercedes driver finished third for the third time in a row.

His team-mate George Russell collided with Sergio Pérez on the first lap and received a five-second penalty, but managed to finish the race in fourth place – thanks to this result and the points earned in the sprint, Mercedes earned 33 points over the weekend – two more than Red Bull Racing.

Lewis Hamilton (3rd): “First of all I would like to say a big thank you to all the girls and guys in the pits who have worked so hard to restore my car. Unfortunately I needed a new car on Saturday morning – this doesn’t happen to me very often, and I want to thank everyone again for the hard work.

Yesterday’s sprint was difficult, but today’s race was better. I had a high pace in several stages of the race, although I rode alone for most of the distance. The team had a difficult weekend, but I am grateful for third and fourth place. We earned a lot of points and improved the car. We have to keep working to get back to the first positions.”

George Russell (4th): “I started fourth and finished fourth. I probably would have agreed to such an alignment before the race, but now I’m a little disappointed with how everything turned out.

On the first lap of turn four, Sergio attacked from the outside and started cutting the corner. For me was Carlos Sainz and I had no choice but to take the top on the curb. I consider the penalty severe – in my opinion it was a racing incident.

On the positive side, I lost 20 seconds in the pit stop right after the start, but finished about 15 seconds off the podium – I broke from 19th to 4th and we maximized the team’s result. We have to keep working hard.”

Toto Wolff, Team leader: “Lately it seems like we can’t decide whether to be happy with the results or not. We take third and fourth place today. In fact, a strong result, if we take into account that on Friday both cars were broken. However, we are missing two or three tenths to compete in the foreground.

When working with the machine we occasionally see a glimpse of light at the end of the tunnel, but then the light disappears again, but we have to reach our goal. In the race we looked more competitive than yesterday. However, our riders had to bounce back after incidents in the sprint and in the early laps of the race.

Nice to see Charles Leclerc at the top of the podium. He has had a lot of bad luck lately, but he continues to fight forward. We have to keep working with the car to close the gap with the teams at the front.”