Disappointed Sutil rues lack of grip

The Force India driver had looked strong in practice but then was unable to repeat that sort of performance in the grid-deciding session, in which he finished down in 13th.

Sutil admitted he was at a loss to explain the lack of performance.

"This morning the car felt really good and I could push on both the prime and the option tyres, and it showed in the time I was able to do," said Sutil. "But in Q2 I had a clean lap but the grip just didn't seem to be there.

"Over the whole session it was so hard and we couldn't get the tyres to work - such a big difference from the morning session.

"It's obviously very disappointing as we looked very strong here and we didn't change much from this morning. I'm now concentrating on the race - we had a good event here last year and, as we saw in Montreal, our race pace is very strong so there's always opportunities to make up positions."

Vitantonio Liuzzi also suffered from the same problems as Sutil, the Italian finishing down in 14th.

"This morning we were really quick and it didn't start too badly in Q1 for us so we were very positive about getting a good result," he said. "But it got very hot this afternoon, perhaps seven or eight degrees hotter than in free practice this morning, and it seemed to have a big effect on the tyres.

"Both Adrian and myself had big issues with the soft tyres in Q2 and had a lot of understeer. It's a real shame as both yesterday and this morning we were looking very competitive and we had hoped for more.

"But we're not giving up as there are so many possibilities in the race - just look at Montreal where we had the accident at the start, but fought to the end and still picked up two points."