Sutil boosted by China performance

The German took advantage of his wet weather skills to make his way from the back of the field and run in seventh position near the end of the race.

However, with just five laps to go, Sutil lost control of his car and crashed heavily into the barriers.

Despite his failure to score, Sutil reckons the performance helped lift the team's spirits.

"It's always good to have a strong race like this," Sutil said. "We nearly made it to the end. It's important that the Force India car is somewhere near the front. It's good for us, good for the team and it lift our spirits to go on."

He added: "It was very disappointing, but you have to get over it. There's always a next race, that's the good thing. But it's hard. We deserved it so bad and it was so close to happen, but it didn't. But we don't give up. We will try our best next time, there will be another chance and we will take it."

Sutil's exit was similar to that at the Monaco Grand Prix last year when, after a sensational race, he was forced to retire from fourth place when Kimi Raikkonen crashed into him.

The Force India driver admitted the Monaco crash hurt more.

"I think Monaco was even worse because I didn't do anything wrong and somebody hit me," he said. "Here it was a risk and we thought it was going to be tight in the end with the tyres and everything.

"If the rain would have stopped we would have been alright, but it started to rain a bit more in the last 20 minutes and then it was very tricky to drive and that actually destroyed our result in the end."

Sutil is hopeful the team will be able to take a stop forward in Bahrain this weekend thanks to the introduction of new components.

"It should help, definitely," he said. "Let's see if we can catch up. The other teams have put a downforce step on the car as well, but hopefully it is enough to close the gap a bit. But we still need to hope for these conditions to really make it into the points "