01/07/2018
NEWS STORY
Lance Stroll finished 13th and Sergey Sirotkin 14th in the Austrian GP. Lance had a strong start and made up two places to P11 whilst Sergey initially dropped to P17 avoiding collisions. Lance made his first pitstop on lap 15 to switch to the Pirelli soft tyre. On lap 21, Sergey continued to climb and reached P11 before also pitting for the Pirelli soft tyre. After the battle for 14th with Leclerc, Lance was P15 and Sergey P17. Sergey and Lance both made a second pit stop in the final stages, with Sergey switching onto the ultrasoft tyre and Lance onto the supersoft.
Lance was given a 10 second time penalty plus 3 penalty points on his licence for ignoring blue flags which dropped him to 14th and moved Sergey up to 13th.
Paddy Lowe, Chief Technical Officer: It is good to get two cars home as many teams didn't manage that, but, having said that, overall it was a disappointing day for us. The expectations on pace were higher than we saw this afternoon, where, ultimately we weren't quick enough to get points on a day when a lot of points were on the table. We had a good one-stop strategy that would have worked until our pace fell apart. We then had enough of a gap for a free stop towards the end, and so pitted both cars again to protect against any tyre wear issues in the final laps.
Lance Stroll: I thought we could do better today. Looking where we were in qualifying, I hoped we could potentially fight with some of the other teams, but unfortunately today was kind of the same story but a different day. I had a decent start, gained some positions, but from there it was just survival and we were really slow to the end as we struggled with pace. We were struggling with tyres, temperatures and everything and couldn't really do anything with our strategy today.
Sergey Sirotkin: It was a very disappointing race. Straight away at the start I was doing so well, but every time I was on the inside and very close to the collisions. However, with traffic ahead I was always slowing down to not hit the cars in front. Instead of gaining the positions, I'm afraid I lost a bit. From then onwards, I was in clean air and everything looked ok and I was keeping a few cars behind me. We pitted early and tried to be quite aggressive and push hard straight away in the second stint, but, I ran out of tyres. So overall, a disappointing day.
Check out our Sunday gallery from Spielberg, here.