F1 Force India: Sutil penalty too harsh

Force India team manager Andy Stevens believes that stewards were unnecessarily harsh in giving Adrian Sutil a three-place grid penalty for blocking Mark Webber in Bahrain qualifying. The German moved across in front of Webber at the final corner as the Red Bull finished its final Q1 flying lap and Sutil prepared to start his.
The delay left Webber 19th on the grid, which became 18th when Sutil was demoted three places from 16th as a punishment for the move.Amid suggestions that Force India was to blame for not alerting Sutil to Webber coming up behind him, Stevens said his driver was actually an innocent victim of a brush between Robert Kubica and Fernando Alonso ahead.
"We were watching the timing monitors and we could see that Webber was on a fast lap behind us, but what we felt at the time was that Adrian was far enough in front that we didn't really have to consider it - it wasn't going to affect Webber's lap as we saw it on the GPS monitor," Stevens explained in an interview on Force India's official podcast."But in front of us Alonso and Kubica had sort of tangled together in the last corner, which had meant that Alonso had backed out of the throttle, and Adrian came upon him a bit too quick.
"So Adrian came out of the throttle, looked in his mirrors, and Webber was there."It looked like he tried to move over to get out of the way just at the same point as Webber decided to go around Adrian, so they tangled a bit, which did ruin Mark's lap unfortunately."
Stevens did not feel Force India could have warned Sutil about Webber in the time available."Certainly my point of view was that at the time we could've given Adrian the message that Webber was coming, it wasn't a problem and we didn't need to inform him," he said.
"We don't want to break the driver's concentration as he's just about to begin his lap - they're focused and they're got to do one lap and lay everything on the line."Unfortuntely what happened between Kubica and Alonso affected us."
But the stewards insisted the team should have instructed Sutil to get out of Webber's way."In my mind, the timescale that we had to do that was too short," said Stevens."So I feel the penalty was very, very harsh."
He added that Webber had seemed sanguine about the incident, and suggested that the officials should not have been involved."When you look at the times from Webber as well, he probably wouldn't have made it through to Q2 anyway," Stevens said."It was a bit of sour grapes, I believe, on Red Bull's part.
"I believe these things should be kept out of the stewards' rooms and we look after it ourselves."We had dealt with it with Mark and he was quite happy that it was an innocent circumstance, but the stewards got involved."