Dominic Harlow: “It’s the best outcome we could have hoped for”
Saturday ,15 October 2011
Force India had another strong qualifying session in Korea as both Paul Di Resta and Adrian Sutil made it through to Q3. In the final session Paul went out of the garage and Adrian did not, and that ensured that he will start ahead. We asked Circuit Engineering Director, Dominic Harlow, about how practice and qualifying unfolded
Two cars in the top 10 again – are you pleased with the outcome of today?
“I think it’s the best outcome we could have hoped for in Q3. We’re well set up for the race. We’re quite pleased with the job we did. We knew it was going to be very tight, but ran a good programme in FP3 to get ourselves a little bit of race preparation data, and some of the changes we made to the car set-up between FP3 and qualifying worked as intended, and gave us strong enough pace for a good run in Q2.”
Did you achieve anything in the rain on Friday?
“From Paul’s point of view it was an opportunity to get some decent mileage in. He did more laps than anyone, and he’s only done one simulator session before coming here. He did getting on for a race distance worth of running on Friday to get a look at the place. It gave us the initial feel for how it might be behaving with the Pirelli tyres as opposed to the Bridgestones last year.”
How did the first qualifying sessions unfold? Adrian set his time fairly late on.
“It was a pretty conventional approach because we normally start with a run on the softs, and we run a set of supersofts if we have too, which is usually determined by the car in 17th/18th position. If anyone in the top bunch of teams has a problem then we can abort our run or save our tyres. We saw it in Suzuka with Rosberg. They quite cleverly left him in the car and gave the impression that he might go out on the track, and by the time you find out he’s not going to, it’s too late, and you’ve used your tyres!”
Did Q2 go pretty much to plan?
“In Q2 we used our supersofts from Q1 for a first outing, and then a new set, so again a fairly normal programme of two runs. It was useful here with the scarcity of dry running to have those extra outings and keep improving the lap time bit by bit. It allows the drivers to really get a feeling for the balance. We made some adjustments to our front wing and then an all-out run towards the end of that session on the supersoft, and if the track has improved a little bit, you capitalise then. It was just enough, as you saw we were neck and neck with Toro Rosso in the first two sessions on both the prime and the option. We just got the best of it in the final run.”
Why did Paul go out in Q3 while Adrian did not?
“Initially we were looking at Petrov and whether we could possibly get a position from him. He looked fairly strong on his first run and at that stage we thought it would be better to make him put in another outing and take a couple more laps out of his tyres. It was a bit of a cat and mouse thing – they obviously had to cover our running.”
Red Bull saved three sets of prime tyres for the race with each car. What do you think of that strategy?
“I struggle to see a race where you need three brand new sets of prime, but perhaps with their performance and the way that you can run at that end of the field it may be a very small margin on paper that suggests that’s a good thing to do. I think at these last races they might be a bit more experimental with their approach. Different strokes for different folks!”
Credit: Sahara Force India Formula One Team (www.forceindiaf1.com)
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