In Saturday practise, Adrian Sutil was 17th and Giancarlo Fisichella was 19th. They'd looked fairly good at the start of the session, but faded as other teams got into their stride - a common pattern for Force India this year.

Things did not improve for qualifying. Giancarlo had a throttle problem which limited him to two runs and 18th place on the grid. It is unclear how much use the third run would have been given that Adrian was 0.05 seconds slower and in 19th. Force India avoided locking out the back row of the grid largely because Sebastien Buemi fell off the track and crashed on his final run.

In the race, both drivers had an average start and were running in 17th and 18th for most of the dry part of the race. Adrian opted for low fuel and a two-stop strategy while Giancarlo tried for a one-stop. In the end, neither strategy paid off because Force India put both drivers on extreme wet tyres when there was little more than drizzle on the track. While Malaysia's storms frequently change intensity at short notice, the strategy in this case failed because of too much caution. By the time the worst of the rain came, the extreme wet tyres might as well have been slicks.

The surprise, therefore, was not why Giancarlo went off the track twice (the second time ending his running due to being beached in Turn 14's gravel) but how Adrian made it back to the pits just before the red flag was flown. Since he was due to pit, he could have refuelled as he liked as well as made any changes normally permissible in a pitstop. Every other runner at that point would have been limited to the minor changes allowed on the grid.

This became moot, however, when it became apparent that the darkness caused by the clouds would not abate before the darkness of the night arrived. Under the countback rule, Adrian's 15th became 17th because he'd passed two drivers in the last frenetic lap-and-a-half. Giancarlo kept 18th place because the first spin was just before the cut-off period, but was deemed a finisher (as opposed to a classified non-finisher) because the second spin was after the point where count-back was done.

Overall, a weekend that Force India will be keen to put behind them. China cannot come soon enough.

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