27/03/2010
NEWS STORY
The Force India F1 Team will start tomorrow's Australian Grand Prix, the second race of this year's championship, from tenth with Adrian Sutil and 13th with Tonio Liuzzi. The top 10 start is the team's second consecutive Q3 entrance and the sixth career top 10 start for Adrian Sutil. Tonio Liuzzi was unfortunately unable to progress into Q3 on this occasion after his potentially quickest runs were interrupted by traffic.
Adrian Sutil: It's not disappointing to start tenth but it's not entirely satisfying either as I felt we could have done better. All the same we made it through to Q3, which was another great effort from the team, and we got the maximum we could have in the earlier sessions. I made two runs in Q3 and neither were particularly great as the soft tyres didn't seem to get up to temperature. We've had a good pace through the weekend so we have a strong platform to go from but let's see what will happen on Sunday. At this stage I don't want to make any predictions.
Tonio Liuzzi: Really disappointing today. There was so much traffic - it was just impossible. Pretty much every lap I had some problem, particularly with the Williams of Hulkenberg and the Sauber of de la Rosa who don't seem to be able to use their rear view mirrors. In all the sessions, on all of my runs, I struggled to finish a proper lap. I had green on the first two sectors but then got held up in the last sector, sometimes in the last corner. It's a shame as I definitely think the pace was there to make it through to the top ten. I think we need to find a solution to this as there are so many cars and too many different speeds. If it's like this here, I don't know what it will be like in Monte Carlo, which is even tighter.
Dr Vijay Mallya, chairman and team principal: I think it shows a lot that our drivers are disappointed with these positions. Last year we would have been delighted, but this year we expect more. Tonio got caught in traffic on every lap and without this I think we could have been in Q3 with two cars. Adrian was not entirely satisfied with tenth but nevertheless we can look to build on this tomorrow. Overall though a great effort from the team and the drivers to maintain the form we showed in Bahrain.