Liuzzi upbeat on Force India form

Team-mate Adrian Sutil topped the times in the morning session in the Mercedes-powered VJM03, and while Liuzzi finished down in 14th in the afternoon, the Italian feels Force India is in a strong position for Saturday.

"Overall, it was a productive day," Liuzzi told AUTOSPORT. "We enjoyed the practice and we completed the programme that we intended to with good results.

"The car is reacting well, as we saw in testing and we covered a lot of laps so we saw how the cars reacts to different levels of fuel. In this heat, it won't be easy because we didn't test in this condition but we are pretty happy because we didn't find any problems today. We are in a good position for tomorrow."

He added: "I think that today has confirmed everything we understood from testing and it is pretty much where we expected to be. Now we have to wait for qualifying tomorrow to see where the car is and to see what we can achieve in racing."

"The car reacted pretty well on the long runs with high-fuel, but qualifying will be a big difference. More than 150kg of fuel can make quite a difference to the balance of the car but tomorrow everyone has to show what they have in qualifying. But I'm pretty sure that we are in good shape.

Liuzzi also admitted that he felt confident about the long-run pace of his car, despite tyre degradation being higher than in winter testing.

"In Barcelona we had really strong long runs and here we also had strong long runs but for sure the degradation has been much higher compared to Barcelona but that is normal with these track conditions and it's the same for everybody," he said.

"We can be pretty happy because we had some positive long runs and we will see how Sunday goes when everybody shows the cars. Maybe it will be different."