01/09/2012
NEWS STORY
Sahara Force India delivered a strong performance during the qualifying hour as Paul Di Resta qualified in tenth place for tomorrow's Belgian Grand Prix. Teammate Nico Hulkenberg set the twelfth fastest time.
Paul Di Resta: "I'm quite pleased with our performance today. The car had pace this morning during practice and was working well on this track where you need lots of downforce as well as efficiency. My lap in Q2 felt very good and was about the maximum that was possible. In fact, I couldn't repeat the time in Q3 and I went a tenth slower, so that was the speed we had in the car today. With the grid penalty for Mark [Webber] I will probably start from ninth, which puts us in a great position to come away with some points tomorrow."
Nico Hulkenberg: "I'm a little bit disappointed with the result today because I felt it was possible to make the top ten. There wasn't as much preparation time in the dry as I would have liked, but we were in reasonable shape this morning and made some good progress with the set-up. On my final lap in Q2 I didn't get the middle sector quite right, lost some time, and missed out on Q3. For such a long lap the times were very close today and just a tenth or two would have been enough to move up the grid."
Otmar Szafnauer, Chief Operating Officer: "With limited dry track time available this morning we did a good job to dial the cars into the circuit and found a good set-up going into qualifying. Paul was very competitive in Q2 and managed to make it through to Q3, but unfortunately Nico just missed out on making the top ten with a small error in the second sector of his Q2 lap. We expect dry conditions for the race tomorrow and will be targeting points for both cars."
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