Both Adrian Sutil and Paul di Resta were in the car on Force India‘s final day of pre-season testing in Barcelona, completing 26 and 42 laps respectively.
Sutil explained that no run on the supersoft Pirelli tyre was the reason for him finishing the day eleventh in the timesheets.
“We wanted to do a qualifying sim as we missed this yesterday but in the end we only managed one run on the soft tyres as we had some set-up changes that took a bit longer than expected,” said the German, who was in the car this morning. “It gave us an idea of where to go, but unfortunately we ran out of time to do a run on the supersoft, which ultimately would have put us further up the final classification.
“We’ve identified some areas we can improve on the car and a general direction so we’re going to concentrate on this between now and Melbourne.”
Di Resta finished only one place higher on the timesheets today, but is looking forward to his debut F1 race in just over two weeks time.
“I got a chance to get back in the car this afternoon for my final laps before the Australian Grand Prix,” said the Scot. “We got some reasonable running and tested part of the aero upgrade package for the start of the season. We’ve still got some fine-tuning to do for Melbourne so we’ll go back to the factory to work on this.
“It’s been a really useful time for me, I’ve learnt what we need to focus on so I’ll spend the time between now and the first race making sure we’re running to our full capabilities to be fully ready for my Grand Prix debut.”
Circuit engineering director Dominic Harlow said that there will be plenty of work going on between now and the opening race as the team analyse the data they have collected from the pre-season testing.
“As ever there is more to do to improve the performance of the car and there will be some further developments for the first race,” he said. “Our reliability over the race distances here has been good and we’ve collected a lot of data on the tyre performance that we feel will be useful as we prepare our race strategies at the coming events.”
