Singapore GP: Team Review – Force India

A promising start to the season, a fifth place in the Constructor’s Championship gained and lost, a heap of retirements and just three points in 5 races. That sums up Force India-Mercedes 2013 Formula One season. Blame it on the Pirelli or on driver errors or reliability issues, there are no two ways about the fact that Vijay Mallaya’s team has gone from good in the first-half to worse in the second-half of the season. In Singapore, the place where the team had done exceptionally well in the past, the story was no different.

Force India are six points behind Mclaren Mercedes after a disappointing performance at Singapore GP

The qualifying was disastrous to say the least, with Paul di Resta going out in Q1 with seventeenth on the grid while Adrain Sutil was unable to make it to Q3 and had to be content with fifteenth place.

For the race, the two drivers had a different tyre and pit-stop strategy with Sutil going in for a three stopper beginning with super-softs and Di Resta had a two stop stint starting on the mediums. Everything went according to plan before Di Resta parked his car into the barriers at turn 7 with just six laps remaining.

Sutil picked up the final point as a result of Mark Webber’s retirement in the penultimate lap of the race. The reason for his retirement, though, is still under investigation and remains to be disclosed by the team. Di Resta’s race retirement would have hurt the team more as both the McLarens finished among the points (getting a total of 10 points compared to Force India’s one) which helped them take a lead of six points with six races to fight for a much talked about battle for the fifth place in the Constructor’s table.

Paul Di Resta

Paul Di Resta had a decent race before he crashed his Force India into the barriers

Di Resta consistently outsmarted his teammate, first passing during the first lap and then putting in a few hard laps to gain from a two stop strategy. He was, in fact, the last driver to pit on lap 21 to get a fresh pair of super-softs. Before his pit stop, he was able to hold off Fernando Alonso for over 5 laps for third place and that showed a few good signs for things to come in the race.

He managed to stay in the with a whole bunch of drivers before pitting on lap 43 for the final time to get medium compounds. But disaster struck with 7 laps remaining as his Force India struggled hard to take the Turn 7 and just went ahead straight for the barriers. A promising race that had a familiar result (like in the previous three races) for the Englishman.

Adrian Sutil

Adrain Sutil salvaged a single point with some luck going in his favour

Starting ahead of his teammate, Sutil was the only one to start with medium tyres while the rest of the drivers started with super-soft compounds. The idea behind the tyre change was to have a different strategy from the rest which would brighten the chances of point scoring. The strategy was on track but Sutil had a difficult time managing his tyres and struggled for grip on a bumpy circuit.

While his start wasn’t the best as Di Resta overtook him in the first lap, but Sutil had his share of battle’s passing Esteban Gutierrez in the Williams-Renault and Jean Eric Vergne in the Scuderia Toro Rosso a couple of times. A gritty drive, after the safety car peeled off, kept him near to the upper mid-field runners. It was difficult to catch the McLaren-Mercedes of Sergio Perez and Nico Hulkenberg in the Sauber-Ferrari in the final laps with Sutil finding it extremely hard to maneuver his car.