Sutil hopes his talent is now noticed

With his Force India team having taken a significant step forward, Sutil has been able to be in a position to score points in most races so far this year. The German is 10th in the championship with 22 points from the first seven races.

Sutil admits he is very happy with how his season is going and hopes people are noticing his skill.

"I think it's good to be in the points regularly with a small team," said Sutil. "It's still one of the smallest teams in the field. I can do more scoring points and getting good results. In the end it's up to the people to decide what they think about it.

"I need to be happy. I'm doing this for myself. I want to be successful here, so the most important thing is that I go to a circuit and I leave the circuit and I cay say to myself I did the best I could do.

"At the moment I'm very happy and I hope people can see that I'm a talented driver."

He added: "I'm very happy. It's very hard to make myself happy. I always look first to myself, to my errors and try to analyse as much as possible. But there have been many races where I said 'Okay, that was the maximum' and I was happy with myself."

The Force India driver says the better performance of this year's car is making his life much easier, as he feels he had to push too hard to get a decent result last year.

"Last year I had to risk too much to get a decent result sometimes," Sutil said. "And of course it was too easy to go over the limit and to crash really bad.

"And then people only look at you and say you are having too many accidents or something. But then you are suddenly the hero if you put a somewhat bad car on the front row. That's how it is. You need a consistent car, you need a good car to show [your skill]. It's no secret.

"I think I have it this year and that's why I'm performing on a consistent level. I know it's possible and I don't need to push over the limit.

"Last year it was different. We started out quite bad and we ended up very good, with a car that could be on the podium sometimes. It happened so quickly and sometimes you don't really know what to do in those situations."