Adrian Sutil put in a solid performance for the Force India team here in Bahrain this afternoon, the young German racer proving that the promise they displayed in winter testing was indeed the real thing. Predicting for weeks now that he would be in the top ten, Adrian did just that and qualified his car tenth.

However, with a view to the race strategy tomorrow, in which drivers starting in the top ten must start the race on the tyres on which they qualified, Adrian made his final run of the last session on the harder tyre compound, the only driver in Q3 to do so.

“I'm very happy,” he said. “I think it was a great achievement to go into Q3 at the first race: our best start to the season for a long time. The team should be very proud of it, I am very proud of this, so let's see how it goes tomorrow. Our goal is now to finish in the points. At the moment I'm in tenth and hopefully we can make one or two positions up as I'm the only car on the hard tyre so it may be an advantage.:

“I'm surprised that the others were on the soft tyres so our decision could pay off tomorrow. We are strong under heavy fuel loads but we were very fast in Q1 and Q2 when everyone was on soft tyres so there are a few more positions we could gain. We worked very hard over the winter and over the last four years and it's nice to see it giving dividends now.

Meanwhile, teammate Tonio Liuzzi will start from 12th position and while he is somewhat disappointed not to make it into the top ten, he is looking to a stronger race performance here tomorrow....

“I am a bit disappointed as we didn't know what had happened to the car since free practice. In the morning it seemed to have a pretty good balance and we didn't change very much but then we went into qualifying and we had a problem with the traction,” he explained. “That was the main reason we couldn't go through to Q3. Now we have to work on this and understand what happened but we believe in the race that we should be really strong as yesterday we were quick on the longer runs.”