Bottas wins in season opener.

Car number 77 had a driver at the wheel this weekend in Austria that was like a dog with a bone.... He wasn't letting go. He suffered several safety car restarts, managed to get the drop on everyone even though they all had DRS and were traveling in a pack that could have been detrimental to the race leader. Bottas showed his pace whilst both cars were suffering from gearbox issues due to the vibration of running over the kerbs. At one point it even became "Critical". 

I would admit that during the lockdown period I thought that his seat was up for grabs, especially by the likes of George Russel. Now I'm not so sure. I think he has definitely worked incredibly hard to get the result he just got. Honestly it couldn't happen to a nicer guy. He is resilient and shown that during the lockdown he has trained like a champion and now is leading the Championship. Ok its only the first race in but I expect a lot more podiums are coming from his side of the garage now. 


Valtteri Bottas
Winning an F1 race is never easy, but today was particularly challenging. There were so many things going on in the race and it would have been quite easy to make a small mistake and lose it all. When the Safety Car came out the last time, I was thinking 'Come on! Again!?' I guess it was my chance to really master the restarts here. When you're in the lead, you want things to be constant and trouble-free, but today felt more like dodging bullets, though things were never out of control. I could build a good margin in the first stint and look after the car and the tyres to make sure that we could stick to our planned strategy. In the second stint, there was more pressure, particularly after all the Safety Cars. We faced some reliability concerns during the race, which put quite a bit of pressure on us, but luckily we made it to the end with both cars. I think we've shown that we have a good package. We need to get on top of the reliability issues, but I have no doubts that our team can solve those. I'm looking forward to another race here next weekend.
 
Lewis Hamilton
The team did a really great job today and so did Valtteri. I drove my heart out in the race, I did everything I could - but it was just one of those weekends. There are lots of areas where I can improve. I didn't do a great job in Qualifying yesterday and there's only me to blame; then this morning was very unusual to get called up right before the race, but I just tried to keep my head down and drive hard. The scenario with Alex felt more like a racing incident to me. The time penalty meant that I lost the podium, but it is what it is. The car felt great, although reliability was a real issue for us today. But at least we finished, so we'll take those points. Obviously it's a loss from a potential 1-2, but I'll try to recover those in the coming races. Ultimately, this was not a good weekend for me, but it could be worse - I'll take what I've got, try to learn from it and be better next time.
 
Toto Wolff
What a great race for the fans who waited so long to see F1 back on TV. Congratulations to Valtteri and the entire for the win. It wasn't a good day for Lewis who was very unfortunate with the two penalties. The grid penalty is something you must take on the chin, but the five-second time penalty felt too harsh from my perspective. I looked at the video a couple of times: Lewis had full steering lock in the corner, Albon had track left to make the corner, so in my opinion this wasn't justified. But I recognise that the stewards have a very complex job of coming up with the right decisions and sometimes those decisions go for you, sometimes against. As a team, we faced some real challenges with our gearbox in the race. The situation was pretty serious; we saw issues on Valtteri's car early on and a little later on Lewis' car as well. It was something that could end your race instantly. We know that it was linked to the vibration of the car which is why we asked both drivers to keep off the kerbs. At a certain stage it looked like neither of our cars would finish the race, so we were trying to cruise home and really look after our cars. Both drivers showed strong pace, they were pretty evenly matched this weekend and it was really more the reliability that caused us headaches. Spielberg stresses some parts on the car more than any other track in the season, so we need to work hard to improve the situation for the next weekend, but we have some ideas on how to do that. ​