Formula One News » Sutil: Room for more improvement Posted on 04/09/2010
Force India F1 team’s Adrian Sutil has predicted there is a lot more still to come from the Silverstone-based outfit this year.
Sutil took another encouraging result at the Belgian Grand Prix last weekend, finishing fifth, to equal his previous best result of 2010. It increased his personal tally to 45 points and lifted him to ninth in the drivers’ championship, ahead of fellow countryman and multiple F1 world champion, Michael Schumacher.
After two difficult races in Hungary and Germany it was a welcome return to form for the 27-year-old and he is now feeling bullish ahead of the Italian Grand Prix, where he will be gunning for his ninth points’ finish of the season.
“I took another fifth place finish at Spa so I am very pleased as I started in P8,” Sutil said.
“I think that was the best we could do. It was very tricky conditions out there and you never knew what would happen with the weather. When the rain came it was sometimes light in places and heavy in others and I had to really concentrate to drive it home safely. Of course I was racing closely so I had to keep pushing, particularly after the safety car periods when the field bunched up, so we had some great racing and overtaking.
“The upgrades worked well and we can still improve – it was just the start of the development, which looks good for the next race in Monza as well.”
Force India F1’s chief operating officer, Otmar Szafnauer, was also happy with the weekend, as not only did Sutil score but Vitantonio Liuzzi also took a point in the sister VJM03, promoted to P10 post-race after Sebastien Buemi got a 20-second penalty.
“We’re obviously very pleased to be back in the points again,” Szafnauer said. “Both drivers demonstrated a strong race pace and we worked well as a team monitoring the changeable weather conditions. The points we scored are crucial for the championship at the moment and the pace also bodes well for Monza in a couple of weeks’ time.”
Liuzzi meanwhile was delighted to find himself bumped up late-on: “I’m really pleased to be back in the points again for the first time since Canada,” he continued. “We’ve always been pushing really hard to get a point here, and to make it a double points scoring finish for the team, is a really good reward for all the hard work we’ve done over the past few weeks.
“It was a tough race. We had a good start but I suffered a lot of front and rear graining on the soft compounds early on and also some damage to the front wing. We decided to pit earlier and do a long stint with the hard tyres and it was a pretty good decision as we had a good pace on this set and were in P11, not that far from getting into the points.
“But [Sebastian] then Vettel tried to overtake me at the last corner and took my front wing off. We lost more than 30secs changing the wing and without this I am pretty sure we could have higher.
“But the race pace was still good and the car has been consistent. I’m now looking forward to my home race in Italy.”
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