Force India F1 team plans "significant" upgrades for British GP

The Silverstone-based team lies fourth in this year's constructors' championship after scoring points in every race so far, but it slipped to the back end of the top 10 at the recent Spanish GP after bringing only a modest upgrade package to Barcelona.

Sergio Perez urged his team to keep up in this year's development race, after complaining of a lack of downforce in Spain, but deputy team principal Bob Fernley revealed the VJM07 is unlikely to change substantially until July's Silverstone event.

"Spain was a combination of China and Barcelona upgrades, which have delivered performance on two circuits that are not necessarily our strongest," Fernley told AUTOSPORT. "Let's say they're damage limitation circuits.

"We now move to Monaco, which is very much a random circuit - you can either be hero or zero, you just hope you're hero!

"Montreal should be a reasonable race for us, and all being well we'll aim to have a significant upgrade coming through for Silverstone."

Fernley said it was important Force India maintained focus on how it performs over a race, as well as chasing downforce.

"We need to improve the downforce, we need to improve the performance, but at the end of the day it's about racing and I think the track record of Force India over the five races shows that it's better," he added.

"We've been in the points every race. What we've got to do is make sure we continue the development programme and keep the edge on the race side."

PACE COMPARISON
How Force India compares on raw pace to the frontrunning Mercedes team over the first five races, using each team's fastest lap across each weekend:

Australia +1.603s
Malaysia +1.515s
Bahrain +1.161s
China +1.421s
Spain +2.453s