26 Sep 2012

After a recent run of bad luck everything finally came together for Sahara Force India’s Paul Di Resta in the Singapore night race.

After the first corner at Spa he was fourth, only to fall back with a KERS problem. At Monza he qualified fourth, but took a five-place grid penalty for a gearbox change. In Singapore he finally secured that elusive fourth place after a charging drive from sixth on the grid.

Before the start Paul conceded that even holding on to that position would be a tough challenge, but the race ran perfectly for him. At the start he even briefly got ahead of Fernando Alonso’s Ferrari before settling into sixth, ahead of Mark Webber.

He moved up a couple of places after Sebastian Vettel and Alonso pitted before coming in himself on lap 12, and once the late stoppers Nico Hülkenberg and Sergio Perez finally pitted, he was back up to sixth. When Hamilton retired on lap 23, that became fifth.

The race was all about tyre management and things were looking good when both Alonso and Pastor Maldonado made early second stops on lap 29, and Paul moved into third. However, we never saw how his strategy would have played out because on lap 33 the safety car emerged, and like the other frontrunners Paul made an earlier than scheduled second stop.

Retirement for Maldonado then confirmed Paul in fourth, but any hopes of beating Alonso were spoiled by the safety car, which compromised Paul’s strategy.

“Where we qualified in sixth, it was obviously going to be difficult to maintain that,” says Paul. “But we braced ourselves and through some people retiring we managed to pick up fourth. I think we showed our performance was there in that last stint, we were able to challenge Fernando. We just weren’t quick enough to challenge him the whole way through the stint. He is in the Ferrari and leading the championship!”

Paul kept pushing until the end of the race, but the Ferrari driver held on to his podium position Nevertheless fourth was a very welcome result.

“We picked up on a few retirements, but obviously that’s a big thing here and probably was always going to happen. We were challenging Fernando in that last stint. There was one point at the end of the second stint when it looked like they were going onto a three-stop, had the safety car not come out, whether we would have been on target, I don’t know.

“But it would have been nice of the safety car hadn’t come out, because I think he was in traffic at that point. That is the way it is, to go better than that we need to qualify a bit better and tune a bit more speed in our car.

“You’ve got to enjoy it when you get these results. We’ll knuckle down and try to prepare as much as we can for Japan and spur the guys on to try and get an extra little bit of performance.”

 

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