Force India concludes pre-season testing

Barcelona: Adrian Sutil and Paul di Resta split the day and covered a full race distance between them as Formula One team Force India ended its pre-season testing at the Circuit de Catalunya here.

Sutil and Paul worked on gathering further information on the new aerodynamic upgrades and performance-related items yesterday. Sutil covered 26 laps in the morning and Paul managed 42 in the afternoon, taking the team’s total mileage for this test to over 1,600km. The team will now return to its UK base for a quick turnaround to prepare for the Australian Grand Prix, which will take place in just over two weeks’ time. "Twenty six laps for me on Saturday, working on getting more information on the new aero parts we introduced yesterday. We wanted to do a qualifying sim as we missed this yesterday but in the end we only managed one run on the soft tyres as we had some set-up changes that took a bit longer than expected," Sutil said.“It gave us an idea of where to go, but unfortunately we ran out of time to do a run on the supersoft, which ultimately would have put us further up the final classification. We’ve identified some areas we can improve on the car and a general direction so we’re going to concentrate on this between now and Melbourne,” he added. Paul said some fine-tuning is still left before the team is fully prepared for the Australia Grand Prix. “I got a chance to get back in the car this afternoon for my final laps before the Australian Grand Prix. We got some reasonable running and tested part of the aero upgrade package for the start of the season. We’ve still got some fine-tuning to do for Melbourne so we’ll go back to the factory to work on this,” he said. “It’s been a really useful time for me, I’ve learnt what we need to focus on so I’ll spend the time between now and the first race making sure we’re running to our full capabilities to be fully ready for my Grand Prix debut,” he added. PTI