In a race preview for the upcoming Chinese Grand Prix, Force India's boss Vijay Mallya made it very clear that fifth (place) is still realistic, considering the good progress experienced by his team through the first 3 races of the season.
Vitantonio Liuzzi started off with a 9th place in Bahrain and continued with a 7th place in Australia, only for his teammate Adrian Sutil to top both that performances with a 5th place in Malaysia. Given that obvious positive trend, Mallya admitted his enthusiasm over the work put in by the Force India engineers.
“The grid is very tight as we saw in Malaysia and Australia and there's no clear delineation between the front and the midfield. The most important at this stage is that we are still up there fighting. Renault look very strong right now but there's still a lot more races to go this year and we have a clear direction about where we are going that will keep us with them, or hopefully leapfrog them,” said Mallya, who did not announce any important updates for the VJM03 this weekend.
At least from a points perspective, Force India are not far away from achieving their goal this season, as the Indian outfit is only 12 points behind Renault in the classification. An advantage for Mallya's team may prove to be that both his drivers have shown they have the ability to score points, while at Renault only Robert Kubica seems to do the job.
Vitaly Petrov is yet to score a point in F1 this season, having experienced reliability problems with his R30 two times this year.
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