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Paul Di Resta Q&A

Saturday ,23 July 2011

“We’ve got a reasonable base”

Force India’s Paul Di Resta had a difficult job today as he had to learn the Nurburgring GP circuit having only driven on the short version during his F3 and DTM career. In addition he didn’t get to sample the track until the afternoon, having handed his car to Nico Hulkenberg for FP1. Nevertheless he did a good job to quickly get up to speed and take 12th place, less than a tenth off team mate Adrian Sutil.

You only drove in the afternoon session today. What did you learn?

I think it was quite satisfying, considering it was half a day on a track I don’t know. With the programmes of both cars we’ve got through everything we set out to do, so that was a good job done by the team. We analysed the new update package, and the guys are going through the numbers. It seems to be positive. There were different things that we tried that may benefit us later on in the year. I must say going into Saturday we’ve got a reasonable base, considering the weather is going to be tricky to predict.

In Canada and Britain you went quite well in the wet, even if you didn’t get the result you deserved. Would you like a wet race here?

It might be different here, it just depends. It looks like it’s going to be quite slippery, but it’s the same for everybody. We have to make sure we get the best out of the tyre, that’s the key thing in the wet.

You raced in Germany for many years. Have you seen signs of support?

You tend to see the die-hard fans that follow the DTM and they’re here, but there are six German F1 drivers, and I’m not going to compete against them! There are plenty of DTM fans about, and it’s good. I’ve had a long-term relationship with Mercedes-Benz, and hopefully it can continue on.

You had a frustrating pit stop at Silverstone. Has the team looked at procedures and communications since then?

Yes. It wasn’t one individual thing, there were quite a few things happening together. It hurt us very badly, but for that to repeat itself would be very bad luck. We’ve had meetings and we’ve put procedures in place that are going to benefit us in the future, and hopefully it won’t happen again. It was a freak thing that happened all at once, and the worst thing was the position we were in was so strong.

Credit: Force India (www.forceindiaf1.com)