GreenBkk.com Force India | Dominic Harlow: “We would have liked to have been up there!”

Dominic Harlow: “We would have liked to have been up there!”

Sunday ,28 August 2011

Qualifying in Belgium proved to be a disappointment for Force India as Paul Di Resta didn’t make it out of Q1 and Adrian Sutil crashed in Q2 while holding a superb fifth place in wet conditions. He later dropped down the order as he was not able to respond when others went quicker. We asked Circuit Engineering Director, Dominic Harlow, about the team’s day.

What went wrong for Paul today?

“A number of things didn’t go well in the first qualifying session. We were perhaps one lap shorter on fuel on the first run than some people who did a better time on their fifth timed lap. We managed to get another run in – it was planned that way to come in and go again if the shower that we were tracking didn’t drop a lot of water.”

So you changed tyres and sent him out again?

“We put extra fuel in with a scrubbed set and carried on, which again would have been fine. Unfortunately for Paul he had some traffic on what would have been his banker lap on his first run, and then he had a spin on his final run. Then on the last run it started to rain more heavily at the end of the session. As we saw for Adrian, what we did was good enough to get us through. We were pretty comfortable with that, not having to use extra intermediate tyres, and Q1 is just about getting through.”

Adrian appeared to lose control on the kerbs when he crashed in Q2. Is that what happened?

“The kerbs have been a bit of a talking point this year, we’ve seen it a couple of times ourselves. They’ve painted them and changed the colour-scheme to reflect the new race sponsor, and unfortunately, they are quite slippery!”

How badly damaged was the car?

“It was miraculously good, which I think is testament to the way the front impact structures work. The nosecone took the majority of the impact, and all the energy was absorbed. All the suspension, all the corners, were absolutely fine. We just punctured one rear tyre.”

But it was just too far to get the car back?

“Yes, and in a qualifying session he did the right thing to get out of the way.”

Where do you think Adrian could have qualified?

“I certainly saw us in Q3 with Adrian’s pace in that Q2 session, and beyond that, we who knows? But for example, there was a Toro Rosso in sixth. We would have liked to have been up there!”

Are you confident that it will be a dry race?

“We’re not ruling anything out, but we’d expect it to be drier than the past two days. It will be quite a step into the unknown in terms of the tyres and the set-up and the fuel consumption and so on. It will be very interesting.”

Credit: Force India (www.forceindiaf1.com)