Sutil 11th as Di Resta suffers another troubled qualifying
Force India had another very mixed qualifying session for its drivers. The end result is that Adrian Sutil will start tomorrow’s Hungarian Grand Prix from P11, ahead of teammate Paul Di Resta who qualified P18.
Adrian Sutil, VJM06-03, 11th: “The first part of qualifying was quite tricky and it was difficult to deliver the pace we expected. I had a good feeling with the car, but we were not especially quick and I was only P15 by the end of Q1. I did not really know where we were losing out, but the team made some adjustments and that improved things for Q2. My lap times were much better and for a while it looked like I was going to make the top ten, but then I got pushed down to P11 at the last moment. I’m happy with my lap and that was the limit for me today. P11 is a good place to start because it leaves us with more of a choice about the tyre strategy. The goal tomorrow is to push forward and try to score some points.”
Paul Di Resta, VJM06-04, 18th: “A tough session and I am a bit confused as to why we struggled so much on the soft tyre. Throughout all the sessions we’ve looked more competitive on the softs, but in Q1 they just didn’t switch on. We’ve given ourselves a lot of work to do tomorrow, but we will go away and come back refreshed and ready to fight. We need to move forward so we will think hard tonight about the strategy, but at least we have plenty of new tyres available. I think the main puzzle we need to solve is what happened to our performance today so that we can bounce back tomorrow.”
Otmar Szafnauer, Chief Operating Officer: “Finding the sweet spot with both cars has proved difficult this weekend and I think we saw the result of that in today’s qualifying performance. Adrian squeezed through to Q2 and set a time good enough to put him on the cusp of the top ten. That’s about where we expected our performance level to be and hopefully he can score points tomorrow. The changes made to Paul’s car ahead of qualifying certainly helped our performance on the medium tyres, but he struggled for speed on the softs. That’s something we will try to understand tonight because we expected him to be much higher up the grid. It’s a tough track for overtaking, but we will do all we can to give Paul a strategy to bring him into the points.”
