Saturday: Force India saves its tires in Q3
The Force India drivers qualified for Q3 but opted to focus on saving tires for the race. As a result, Adrian Sutil did not leave his garage, while Paul di Resta did not complete his attempt: both drivers will start in 9th and 10th positions and hope to score new points in the race.
Paul di Resta – 11th and 9th:
We seemed quite solid during the session, although it was very tight in performance with the cars around us, so it was still a difficult session.
It’s good to be in Q3 and it puts me in a good position for tomorrow, especially starting from the clean side of the grid.
Regarding the race, it will be important to be aggressive with our strategy because there are a few fast cars behind us, including a Mercedes, and we have to work hard to keep them at bay. It won’t be easy because I expect the DRS zone to be quite effective here. So there’s a lot of work ahead for us tomorrow, but we approach the race confident that we can bring back some points.
Adrian Sutil – 8th and 10th:
« Considering the limited time we had on a dry track during practice, I think we can be happy with our level of performance today. Getting both cars into the top 10 is a good result, and we can have a solid race from there.
I made the decision to save my tires in Q3 and I believe it was the right thing to do. Having so many new tires for the race is an advantage, it’s something we’ve seen several times this season.
Starting from the dirty side of the track is not ideal, but there is not a long distance to the first corner, so we’ll see what happens at the start of the race.
Robert Fernley, Deputy Team Principal:
« Given that it was very wet yesterday, it was difficult to gauge our competitiveness in qualifying, but we were optimistic that Q3 was achievable for at least one of our two cars. It turned out that both Adrian and Paul qualified for Q3.
In Q3, we decided to play the long game and save tires for tomorrow. Adrian stayed in the garage while Paul went out to try to take eighth place from Vitaly, but he aborted his attempt. This puts us in a better position in terms of tires than the cars directly ahead of us.
We know that we will have to fight to convert today’s result into points, but we have all the strategic options at our disposal, so we are well positioned to achieve this.
