Raikkonen admits loss of control hard to explain

The Ferrari driver suffered excessive wheelspin coming out of Turn 2 at the Red Bull Ring and, as he fishtailed left, he swiped Alonso's McLaren – pitching them both off the track.

Despite a lengthy engineering debrief on Sunday night to try to understand what happened, Raikkonen said the team could not pinpoint if it was driver error or a technical glitch.

"I had some wheelspin and then suddenly I went left and I spun," he said.

"I don't know exactly why it [the wheelspin] was so aggressive and what caused it, but the end result is always the same."

No Canada repeat

Raikkonen's incident came just two weeks after the Finn had spun at the hairpin in Canada, which was put down to a combination of engine mapping settings and cold tyres.

But despite the potential similarities of acceleration out of a slow speed corner, Raikkonen insisted that the situation in Austria was very different.

"It was a pretty odd place," he said. "Usually you get [wheelspin] when you come out of the corner, but obviously it was very far away.

"Whatever caused it made me spin. If it was my fault, it is the same result – it was a pretty shit weekend all in all. That is it.

"Obviously it is not normal. We didn't expect it to happen, we don't know exactly the reason. Something obviously happened. Was it me or was it something else? I don't know."