Vettel: Drivers should be left to sort things out on track

Sebastian Vettel says that he feels race stewards are becoming too intrusive - and that it's the fault of drivers for playing up complaints. He added that drivers should be allowed to resolve more issues themselves on the track.

It comes after an incident in qualifying for the Austrian Grand Prix which meant Vettel was handed a grid penalty for the race. Instead of starting from third, he had to line-up in sixth place.

Vettel had been penalised for impeding a fast lap run by Renault's Carlos Sainz at the end of Q2.

"I was looking down and in the main straight I didn’t see him," Vettel insisted afterwards. "I was thinking that he must be there somewhere. I don’t know if he was pitting or starting his lap.

"As it turned out, obviously, he was trying to go for a fast lap, I couldn’t see him. I wasn’t told on the radio, so I can only apologise to him. Obviously, there was no intention."

Vettel felt that the penalty he received was out of proportion to the offence.

"I don't want to drag on about it," he said. "[But] the rule book's now so fricking big.

"It's a result of all the drivers, all of us," he admitted. "I think we've more or less all been there, whinging and complaining: 'Oh, he's done this, he's done that'.

"In the end you should let us sort it out on track," he said. "That's my belief."

At the time, Sainz had made his displeasure with Vettel's blocking clear. But afterwards he acknowledged that it hadn't been the driver's fault.

"I don't want to put too much blame on Sebastian," the Spaniard said. "It has happened to me before, that your engineer doesn't tell you that there is one car is just starting a lap.

"I got a penalty for that before, but it's not always the fault of the driver," he added.

• Vettel handed three-place grid penalty for blocking!

FIA race director Charlie Whiting insisted that the penalty handed out to Vettel had been entirely in line with those given for similar incidents in the past.

"I think it was deserved, completely consistent with other decisions," he told Motorsport.com.

In the case of Saturday's incident, Sainz still progressed to the final round of qualifying despite losing his final fast lap run. Whiting said that such a factor might be a consideration in deciding future penalties.

"If you wanted to take that path of trying to assess the implications of the actual incident then you could say, in effect, 'No harm, no foul'," he said.

"The impact was low," he acknowledged. "But that's not something we are thinking about [right now]. We are thinking about talking about it [in the future] but it's not something we do presently."

Even though he progressed to Q3, Sainz suffered damage to the front wing of the Renault R.S.18 after being forced to run off the track to avoid the Ferrari. So the team at least might disagree that there was no harm, no foul on this occasion.

"I was angry at that moment because I thought it had cost my Q3 because it was my second run of Q2 and we were pushing flat out," Sainz said. "But thank God I had a good enough lap at the beginning of Q2 to go into Q3, so it's didn't affect my qualifying.

"But it did cost me a front wing," he added.

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