Ambitious
Formula One team owner Vijay Mallya has admitted that he was encouraged by
Giancarlo Fisichella's performance in last weekend's Spanish Grand Prix, but insists that the
Force India F1 operation has to sort out its qualifying woes.
Both Fisichella and second year driver
Adrian Sutil showed well in the various free practice sessions at the Circuit de Catalunya, but were unable to translate that pace into a spot in the second phase of qualifying, missing out for the fourth race in a row. Although Fisichella went on to record a top ten finish - Sutil was eliminated in a first lap accident - Mallya acknowledged that things had to improve on Saturday afternoon if the team was to take a step forward.
"I was disappointed with qualifying after such a strong practice on Friday and Saturday morning, and what I'm noticing is that we're not able to get good qualifying pace out of the car - and we need to investigate that thoroughly," the Indian insisted, "Our race pace has always been decent - people have commented on it, and we showed it again in Spain. We are looking into why we cannot reproduce the lap times in qualifying now and I'm confident we will get to the bottom of it. We have to - if we can start higher up, the chances are we will finish higher up."
The qualifying problem was highlighted not only by Sutil's early exit, but also by the fact that, in race trim, the VJM01 was still a match for reputedly more advanced machines.
"We haven't dropped back, but we do need to sort out our qualifying pace, which is our Achilles heel at the moment," Mallya confirmed, "If we start a few places up the grid, we won't get into traffic or be a little accident-prone like we are when starting from the back. It was a shame that Adrian could not have a full race, as both cars started off very well. But these things happen in racing. If you start further down the grid, you have to take some risks - sometimes they work out very well and sometimes they don't. This is racing.
