McLaren hit by 10,000 euro fine at Red Bull Ring

McLaren will have to reach deep into their pockets to pay off a hefty 10,000 euro fine for an unsafe pit stop release.

The incident happened during the first half hour of Friday morning first free practice session at the Red Bull Ring in Spielberg, Austria.

The team ushered Stoffel Vandoorne out of his garage seemingly unaware that Sebastian Vettel was approaching down pit lane.

The Ferrari had to check its speed to avoid a collision. An irritated Vettel got on his team radio to ask "Did you see that?"

Inevitably the incident was referred to the race stewards, who took a dim view of what they saw.

"The Stewards reviewed the video of the release of car 2 and heard from the driver of car 2 (Stoffel Vandoorne), the driver of car 5 (Sebastian Vettel) and team representatives," said the official statement.

"It was noted that the driver of car 5 had to brake heavily to avoid a collision, locking the front wheels.

"McLaren admitted that the release was the fault of the team.

"The Stewards accordingly determine that the car was released unsafely in beach of Article 28.13 a) of the FIA Formula One Sporting Regulations."

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As a result, the stewards found that McLaren had indeed released Vandoorne in an unsafe manner from the pit garage and imposed a €10,000 fine on the team.

That's on the higher side for this side of incident, which has usually seen fines of about half that for similar occurrences in the past.

It's because it'a a second offence by the team in 2018 - McLaren were previously fined €5,000 during the Chinese Grand Prix for sending Vandoorne’s car out of the pits with a loose wheel.

Vandoorne himself was not penalised for the incident, as he followed team orders and had limited visibility emerging from the garage. As a result, he does not face any grid demotion for this weekend's race as a result.

However, the Belgian driver did suffer a setback in FP1 when he ran wide over the kerbs in the final two right handers. The vibrations ended up breaking the front nose of the MCL33.

However he was soon back in action and completed 30 laps of the circuit, the same as his team mate Fernando Alonso.

However McLaren was the slowest team overall in FP1. The only drivers slower than Vandoorne and Alonso were Toro Rosso's Brendon Hartley and Williams' test and development driver Robert Kubica.

Another driver in the stewards' bad books on Friday morning was Renault's Carlos Sainz, who was handed a €500 fine for breaking the pit lane speed limit.

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