Force India F1 team to drive at 19th, 20th position at Grand Prix

New Delhi, Oct 18 (UNI) Force India drivers Adrian Sutil and Giancarlo Fisichella will start their 2008 Chinese Grand Prix campaign in the 19th and 20th positions respectively.

The duo were evenly matched in qualifying at the ultra-modern Shanghai International Circuit, finishing just 0.09 secs apart.

Although both demonstrated an improved pace from their morning practice times, Adrian and Giancarlo found the grip level much reduced in the afternoon and struggled to find a comfortable balance in the 20 minute first qualifying segment.

Tomorrow's 56 lap race will start at 15:00 hrs local time.

''The balance changed quite a lot in qualifying. Normally you would always find grip, but this time the level was lower and so under braking I had lots of oversteer and locking at the rear and the traction was very bad everywhere, which made it quite difficult to do a perfect lap,'' Adrian said.

''I did three laps and although they were all OK but it makes you think may be there was a little bit more in it as the car is difficult to drive round here. We do have a better race pace though so we should improve on our starting position,'' he added.

Giancarlo, while expressing his disappointment, said, ''I'm not so happy with today as we struggled again with the balance and on my last lap I couldn't improve. I had some really big oversteer through sector two and lost around four tenths and then again through turn eight I lost some more time so I couldn't go faster than my second lap.'' ''It's a shame we couldn't start higher, but we do know we can stay with the others under race conditions so we have to look to have a good strategy tomorrow,'' he asserted.

Chief technical officer Mike Gascoyne also added words on their drivers' performance, saying, ''I think we knew from yesterday that it was going to be a difficult qualifying session. We have been struggling to get the tyres to work and in qualifying both drivers have struggled with the grip so we ended up pretty much where we expected. We do know though that our race pace is always better when we get the tyres to run during the longer runs so we'll look to have a more competitive day tomorrow.'' UNI PY AB GC1958