Barcelona: Force India rounded off a glitch-free day with their cars finishing among top 13 in both the practice sessions ahead of Sunday's Spanish Grand Prix, while Hispania driver Karun Chandhok posted a competitive lap time in the afternoon practice session.
For Force India, Vitantonio Liuzzi and Paul di Resta put the VJM03 through its paces in the morning session, completing 19 and 21 laps to record the 15th and 13th quickest lap times respectively.
Adrian Sutil was back in his regular car in the afternoon as work continued on comparing the performance of the Bridgestone Potenza tyre options available this weekend and evaluating the new mechanical and aero updates introduced for this race.
Sutil posted the 10th quickest time while Liuzzi rounded off the top 12 with a best lap of 1:21.904.
"Today was a pretty good day. I sat out the earlier practice session but we got all the data we needed from the afternoon to be able to understand the tyre performance and how the new aero parts we have brought to the track affect our performance," a satisfied Sutil later said.
"Overall everything seems to be working well. We could do extended runs on both the hard and soft tyre compounds and I was quite happy with the balance on both. The soft tyres take a couple of laps to come in but when they do they seem to work quite well.
"I think we're in good shape for tomorrow's qualifying. I think we should be where we were in China or even higher," added the German.
Like Sutil, Hispania driver Karun also took part only in the second practice session and did a lap of 1:25:972 to end up 22nd, just ahead of team-mate Bruno Senna in the time-sheet.
"I am quite pleased with the job I did this afternoon after not taking part in the first practice session," Karun said.
"I managed to get up to speed quite quickly and ended up with a very competitive lap time. We had some issues with the brakes but am sure we will be able to fix it in time for Saturday morning's session," said the Chennai driver.
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