Adrian Sutil was pleased with his fourth placed finish in the Italian Grand Prix, despite missing out on a podium position.
The young German was in superb form for Force India and overcame drama in his final pitstop to follow Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen home in the points.
Tonio Liuzzi also impressed in the sister Force India. The Italian was running competitively in the points only to be forced to retire with a transmission problem.
Adrian Sutil – 4th: It was a great race and the car was performing really well. At the start we knew it would be really difficult to defend our position against Kimi and his KERS button and then I was stuck behind him the whole race. I was really quick but I just couldn’t find a way past him as the KERS had such a big effect on the circuit. Going into my second stop we had a chance to overtake him in the pit lane and I was pushing really hard but I was a bit late on the brakes into the box. I think I have to say sorry to the mechanics for going a bit wide! But still they did a great job there. The race pace overall was very good but finally the one-stop strategy worked better than the two stop. All the same we scored a lot of points and I am really, really happy for myself and all of the team at the track and back in the factory and wind tunnel.
Tonio Liuzzi – DNF: Finally, I am racing again and I gave it 100%. We didn’t make any mistakes and everything was perfect until we were in a great position, but that’s racing unfortunately. I had an unusual problem, the transmission started making a strange noise and then I lost drive and couldn’t push. That’s racing it was just a shame as we didn’t have a reliability problem until now, but that’s how it is. We won’t give up though until the end of the season, we want to get lots of points and I am sure we will make it.
Dr Vijay Mallya, chairman and team principal: It’s been another great weekend for Force India. We thought the podium would be a dream here going into the weekend and at the end of the race we were less than half a second away. Adrian drove a fantastic race and richly deserved those points. Tonio too almost had a perfect start to his Force India race career, but unfortunately we couldn’t give him the reliability he deserved. Nevetheless he has marked himself out as a real star and I am sure that he will get his own points opportunities further down the line. We can go to Singapore on a real high now. We know the car is good and with more to come development-wise for this race we can be very confident of continuing this form.
