27/08/2010
NEWS STORY
Day one of the Belgian Grand Prix and the usual talking point for the majority of the day was the weather as rain, sun, further heavy rain, cloud cover and then more rain punctuated the F1 running. Force India's Adrian Sutil however flourished in the conditions as the German driver finished fifth in the opening 90 minute session and second in the afternoon. Tonio Liuzzi, running on a different programme to Adrian, put in some productive development work on the team's new blown diffuser and finished in 15th and 16th positions respectively.
Adrian Sutil: With the weather it was quite difficult but I enjoyed it a lot and we had a good balance straightaway. I was very comfortable and every run I went out I was one of the quickest, so a very positive start to the day. In the dry the car was just getting better as grip improved. In the second session I did a run on the hard tyre and then had time for one single lap on the soft right at the end, but there was so much traffic out on the track that getting a time was always going to be hard. But at least we have an idea about the tyres and how the car will perform on the different compounds. We know it's going to be difficult to replicate this form tomorrow when we expect conditions to be drier but overall I'm feeling good, the car is fast and I am in good shape.
Tonio Liuzzi: Overall a difficult day, not just because of the weather, but because of the programme we were running. We had a different programme from Adrian, running with some newer development parts. We have a really good speed into the corners and the car is very balanced. The blown diffuser does the work we expect it to and is performing quite well, but we tried a few things that we still need to define before tomorrow. We are down on top speed and are losing a bit of time on the straights and of course that's not what you want when you're at a place like Spa that has such long straights. I'm positive for tomorrow though and looking forward to getting a complete package tomorrow.
Dominic Harlow, chief race engineer: Two wet sessions today, and a busy test programme for the team. The morning conditions permitted only running on the wet tyre, as we compared different car configurations with Adrian and Tonio. The car was quite well balanced in the wet, but we occasionally did suffer from a bit of understeer. During the afternoon the circuit became dry enough for us to use prime and option tyres, but it wasn't really an evaluation because of the evolving circuit, yet all the same it allowed us to collect more data on the blown diffuser that seems to be working as we expected. However we will be investigating the F-duct performance on Tonio's car this evening as there is a top speed differential between the two cars. Overall our performance seems reasonable and if we follow the conditions sensibly should be able to achieve our twin objectives of Q3 and scoring more points this weekend.