The Mexican Haas driver was handed a five-place grid penalty for driving slowly in the racing line and nearly causing an accident with Manor's Pascal Wehrlein during final practice at Spa.

Wehrlein, who called Gutierrez a "f****** idiot" over the radio, had to drive onto the grass to avoid a crash after finding the Haas car in front exciting Eau Rouge at full speed.

The stewards investigated a similar incident between Sebastian Vettel and Kevin Magnussen, but did not impose a penalty on the Dane.

Gutierrez felt penalising him but not Magnussen was not fair.

"Very harsh, especially considering that Magnussen didn't get anything," said Gutierrez. "It's very harsh.

"It's up to them to decide, but at least be consistent, that's most important. Today they were not consistent, in my opinion.

"I respect them a lot. I came there with the right approach. I explained my situation but the final decision.... It's just an unfair situation to see that someone did something similar and got no penalty."

Gutierrez said the incident occurred because he was not told over the radio that Wehrlein was coming.

"It was a miscommunication error," he said.

"Basically I didn't get the message from my engineer that he was coming and by the came he came from the back, he came very quickly and I left some space to the right, but as he was coming very quickly, I can't make an aggressive move because if I move to the wrong direction it can be even worse.

"So I saw he tried to go to the left and then he changed to the right, so it's the kind of situation where it's better to stay kind of straight, otherwise it can be very dangerous."

The Haas driver qualified 13th, but will drop to 18th after the penalty.

Blue flags criticism

Gutierrez has been on the receiving end of criticism - most notably by Daniel Ricciardo and Lewis Hamilton - for ignoring blue flags in recent races.

Team boss Gunther Steiner said that the blue flag incidents could have contributed to the severity of this particular grid penalty - and felt the issue had been out of proportion, defending his driver.

"With the blue flags, I think he didn't do anything wrong, the only thing that happened was it was Lewis Hamilton and he showed him the finger," said Steiner.

"We did the analysis, the guy that was overtaken by Lewis before him, it took only 0.2s slower to overtake Esteban than the other guy - we got a five second penalty, because Lewis was frustrated from the other guy, then got to him and showed him the finger.

"And Ricciardo, because it wasn't a perfect blue flag overtaking, 'oh, it's Esteban again'. Jesus Christ, he did it once.

"If you've got a car so much quicker, you should be quick enough to overtake yourself and not complain.

"Are you racing car drivers or do you want everybody to move? We need to get a little bit more back to being racers - and if your car is so much better, just overtake him."

Additional reporting by Oleg Karpov