New Season, Same Q1

The promise of Friday came to little on Saturday as Giancarlo Fisichella and Adrian Sutil initially lined up 18th and 19th, ahead of only Sebastién Bourdais. However, they benefitted from Toyota's flexible wing and Lewis Hamilton's gearbox change to eventually line up 15th and 16th.

Saturday practise got to a slow start, especially for Sutil. Even so, Adrian managed to get 14th fastest time in Saturday practise while Giancarlo was 18th. 

However, Giancarlo's position turned out to be a better predictor of Force India's qualifying than Adrian's. Despite Martin Brundle beig very complimentary towards Force India towards the beginning of his commentary about FIF1, the team got caught out by the rapidly tumbling times. In the [url=http://forceindiaf1.com/news.aspx?nid=225]Saturday press release[/url], Dominic Harlow suggested the hurried nature of the car's initial development may have been the cause, while Adrian Sutil thought the other teams mighthave been able to deploy more of their performance in qualifying than practise. No specific incident in qualifying was cited to explain.

Force India received some good luck later on. Lewis Hamilton's gearbox needed replacing, which sent him to 20th and pushed Giancarlo and Adrian to 17th and 18th positions. Then the Toyota drivers got removed from qualifying altogether because an element of the rear wing flexed more under pressure than the regulations permitted. This fault led to Jarno Trulli and Timo Glock starting from the pit lane for tactical reasons and meant the Force India drivers started from a respectable 15th and 16th.