Mercedes is called to stewards because of Botta’s FP2 pit lane spin

Bottas spun his car as he drove out of the Mercedes box 20 minutes before the end of the session, landed in the middle of the fast lane and pointed in the direction of the McLaren garage.

Bottas reported on the team radio that it was the “tire warm-up”, and his race engineer replied: “Not as great as it turned out”.

The McLaren mechanics standing at the team’s garage quickly helped Bottas turn the car before he could go out on the track as planned.

But McLaren team manager Paul James quickly radioed F1 racing director Michael Masi to complain about the incident.

“Michael, this is absolutely ridiculous,” said James. “He could have got our boys out of there and against the pit wall.”

Masi replied: “Agreed, thank you.”

Race management quickly announced that the commissioners would investigate the incident after the session. Bottas and a representative of the Mercedes team would meet them at 4:20 p.m. local time in Austria.

“I spun, we tried something else to get out of the box,” explained Bottas.

“Those were just a few of the variables on what we normally do with wheelspin, so I spun.”

When asked about the summons, Bottas said that he would be “surprised” if something were done.

“It’s a normal mistake, it happens,” said Bottas. “I’m sure they just want to understand what really happened.”

McLaren team boss Andreas Seidl called it a “scary moment” after the session at Sky Sports, but was pleased that his mechanics helped Bottas to point the right way again.

“A scary moment, of course, but it can happen in the end,” said Seidl.

“So in the end we could only help Valtteri to get his car back in the right direction by pushing him back and forth and back and forth.

“I don’t know exactly what happened. It can happen, thank God nothing happened. Let’s all continue with that. “

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