Paul di Resta is hoping to salvage a difficult week off the track for Force India with a strong showing in Sunday's Bahrain Grand Prix.
Scot hopes to salvage difficult week for Force India
Paul di Resta is hoping to salvage a difficult week off the track for Force India with a strong showing in Sunday's Bahrain Grand Prix.
Di Resta lines up a creditable 10th on the grid in spite of the team's decision to miss Friday's second practice session after four team members were inadvertently caught up in a violent protest two days earlier - part of an ongoing campaign by the Shia Muslim majority in the country against the Sunni ruling elite.
The Scot backed Force India's move - their intention being to transport all team personnel back to their hotel before nightfall - but insisted he is on the island to race.
"I support the team. I think the team have said enough about it and why it was done. We've got to respect it," Di Resta said.
"We said it wasn't going to massively affect our qualifying performance. Thankfully, we've got into Q3 and we've shown to be quite strong. We'll just do the best job we can with what we've got over the weekend.
"We're here to race and we're going to race tomorrow. However many laps this race is, there's points up for grabs and we'll be out there fighting for that.
"We've come here prepared to do that - we should be ready to do that. And given where we've qualified, we're even more looking forward to it."
With Force India having earlier taking part in the third practice session as normal, Di Resta's time in the second qualifying session was just three tenths away from the fastest set by McLaren's Lewis Hamilton.
From then on, the 26-year-old elected to save tyres for the race and now has one new set of options and two new sets of primes at his disposal.
He explained: "We took a strategic decision not to run in Q3 to put us in better shape for tomorrow. Track conditions have got worse than yesterday: I think we were one of the only teams to do a long run on high fuel in FP3 to get a bit of tyre data.
"It's pushing us that way - if at all it's going to work - to have three new sets of tyres. How many stops is unknown but really we know cars around us are faster than us and to clear cars, the only way we're going to benefit from that is to have a race plan."
