Force India aims to keep up impressive run in Monaco
Force India continues to impress in 2017, with the team having been in the points with both cars in all five GPs – and COO Otmar Szafnauer is keen to continue that run at Monaco.
The team had been waiting for the Barcelona update package to provide some extra pace after over-delivering in the early races with a car that was clearly slower than its main competition.
Although three retirements ahead clearly flattered the team in Spain and helped Sergio Perez and Esteban Ocon to fourth and fifth, they would still have earned comfortable seventh and eighth places way ahead of their main midfield rivals, indicating that the changes had been for the better. Perez has also been in the points for 15 straight races.
“Seventh and eighth, if you’re the fourth-placed team and fourth quickest, that’s where you are,” said Sazfnauer. “Our race pace was pretty good. In qualifying Esteban made a mistake, he did his lap in qualifying without DRS, which cost him three tenths of a second. With that we would have been seventh on genuine pace, so that’s pretty good. We’re happy with that.
“The package was mostly one for experimentation, so we learned a lot from it. From that learning we’ll take a certain direction with our other tools, and hopefully what we learned will enhance future packages.”
Szafnauer concedes that the team has ridden its luck to get 10 points finishes out of 10, avoiding first lap incidents and so on.
“There’s a bit of luck in that,” he said. “Especially starting mid-grid where we usually start, it’s harder. If you start up front it’s a little bit easier. Mid-grid is where all the stuff happens. So we’ve been lucky, but at the same time we’ve got good race pace, and once we get through the first couple of laps, after that, it’s up to is to bring the points home. And we also have decent reliability.
“It’s got to continue – we’re only a quarter of the way through. We still have to work hard and continue to update the car and do a good job, and Esteban has to continue to keep learning. He made some mistakes in Spain, it didn’t cost him much in the end. I don’t think he could have beaten Ricciardo, he might have been able to beat Checo, but from a team perspective it’s all the same. He’ll keep learning and we’ll keep better, and hopefully we’ll finish fourth in the end.
“In Monaco we usually go well, from Adrian Sutil overtaking two World Champions to Sergio and Nico [Hulkenberg] doing well. In Monaco you need a bit of luck, because you can really do some damage. We’ll see how we go. Hopefully the next three races will suit us, and we’ll be competitive.”
Meanwhile, Perez and Ocon were both pleased with the way the updates paid off in Barcelona.
“It was a fantastic weekend for me,” said the Mexican. “It hasn’t been easy, we brought some parts at the beginning of the weekend, we were not sure if they were working, and we tried so many different parts throughout the weekend. And to set up a car under those conditions, because you don’t know what’s working and what’s not, hasn’t been easy.
“The team has done an amazing job. Probably now we have improved a bit the car, but before that we had one of the slowest cars in the midfield and we outscored most of our rivals. A lot of credit to the team. I’ve been 15 times in the points in a row, which is incredible.”
“We are there once again in the race, we maximize the results all the time,” said Ocon. “The team is not doing anything wrong, it’s doing it all great for the moment, so really pleased with that.
“It shows that even if we are not the richest team on the grid, we keep up the progression, we are always there, and we will always be there. I wasn’t expecting to be that fast at the beginning of the season, because in winter testing we were not really there, but we kept improving all the time. If we can keep doing that I think we can really be P4 in the championship standings, easily.”
