F1 Fanatic

whats happening with him ? di resta is making him look average.. expected a lot more…

@Todfod
Di Resta once again made Hulkenburg look very poor in Bahrain. Likewise, it was Sutil who seriously out-performed Di Resta in the second half of 2011, when he finally got his act together. So I disagree when you say Hulkenburg’s better than Sutil, he’s not.

@Kingshark

Sorry, I meant Bahrain not China in my last post. Di Resta has only convincingly outperformed the Hulk in Bahrain

Also meant that both DiResta and Hulk are not as good as Sutil

I think that Force India’s biggest problem is that although they’ve made progress from 2011, other teams have made more progress. It’s getting very crowded at the front end, with McLaren, Red Bull, Mercedes and Lotus demonstrating excellent pace, and Ferrari are doing well because of Alonso’s ability to drive a car beyond its limits. In the meantime, Force India are busy squabbling with Sauber and Williams and Toro Rosso (when the drivers are actually driving). It’s really difficult to judge their overall position because of the topsy-turvy nature of the season, but it’s conditions like these that normally allow a highly-rated driver to rise up and make a name for himself. And where drivers like Perez have done that, Hulkenberg hasn’t – and he really needs to.

I’m willing to bet that he could be one of the first drivers to be replaced this year (the others being Bruno Senna and one of the Toro Rosso drivers) unless he lives up to the hype.

@kingshark I wouldn’t say they’ve been too bad. Vergne has shown some amazing race pace, whilst Ricciardo has shown great promise all around, but seems to have done a complete reversal of last year, doing better in qualifying than in the race. They’re still better than Jaime, at the very least, but my feeling is that that isn’t as noticeable simply because the STR is easily the worst of the midfield cars.

Now it strikes to me, you are right; the Toro Rosso drivers have been very disappointing so far this season. I’d love to know what Helmut thinks about this. Having second thoughts about dropping Sebastien and Jaime?

I don’t think he’s having having second thoughts. But it wouldn’t surprise me if Toro Rosso dropped the lesser-performing driver at the halfway point in the season and drafted Buemi back in to give the other driver a better benchmark to race against. And if that were to happen, then it would probably have been the team’s plan from the start.

Oh, and I highly doubt Senna will be replaced by the way he drove in China and Malaysia. He’s ahead of Maldonado in the standings, after all.

China was one good drive. Australia, Malaysia and Bahrain were three poor ones.

He lost his front wing on the first lap. The team decided to gamble on the wet-weather tyres, and it paid off.

Even when Senna had to pit early in Malaysia he made little progress up to the red flag as he was too far back. Come the restart he made loads of progress and most of it was through overtaking on the track so it was a genuinely great result