Sahara Force India started its Chinese Grand Prix weekend with two busy practice sessions in Shanghai.

Nico Hulkenberg: "It was a straightforward Friday in which we were able to get through our programme as planned. The majority of our work was on the tyres and on car balance, which should offer us a base to work from for the rest of the weekend. We were able to run with some test items in the morning and hopefully this will give the team plenty of data to process and analyse. I definitely think there is some interesting stuff going forward. We obviously have some work to do in order to extract some more performance from the car, especially as we switch between the different tyre compounds, but that should be the main focus for us tonight."

Sergio Perez: "Today was not the easiest of days for me, especially the afternoon session, but at least the conditions out on track were quite consistent. We had to abort my first run on the option tyres and, when we went to resume it, there was a lot of traffic, which made it difficult to learn about our single-lap performance. It is something we will need to focus on tomorrow morning ahead of qualifying. On the other hand, we were able to fit in a longer run on the prime tyres, which gives us useful information for Sunday."

Robert Fernley, Deputy Team Principal: "It was a very busy Friday for the team and, despite a few minor technical issues that needed addressing, we were able to complete a solid amount of laps. We had the opportunity to test a few new parts that have been created as part of the VJM08's development process and we will need to analyse their impact on the car's performance tonight. The tyre programmes went largely to plan so on that front we should have the necessary information to help our race preparations. We have a lot of work ahead of us tonight and we will push hard to turn what we learned today into performance."

Check out our Friday gallery, here.