Force India drivers blame lack of grip

Sutil and Liuzzi will start on the ninth row of the grid despite the Force India-Mercedes showing a promising turn of speed during free practice.

"The car didn't seem to have any grip at all, particularly on the rear, and there was just so much oversteer that I was just struggling to keep the car on the circuit," said Sutil.

"I'm obviously very disappointed and we need to figure out what happened. The focus will now be on the race; there's still a long way to go and of course I will try my best to get a good result."

Liuzzi is hopeful that a top 10 finish is still achievable despite the disappointment in qualifying, and did not rule out taking his first points finish in over two years.

"Starting so far back will not make it easy, although in Brazil we did show that we can get very close to the points from this position," said the Italian. "It will be difficult but I think 10th will be possible tomorrow, but points are always the aim.

"I was confident that we had the pace to get through to Q2. But then after we changed the tyres for the second run we had a strange problem in that the grip was not there any more. It felt weird to drive with so much less grip compared to the run before.

"Usually the tracks improve as we run more but this was very strange. We should have been in Q2 so we have to understand how this happened - whether it was the tyres or the tyre pressures, we need to work on this now."