Force India F1 Team - Force India VJM03

Force India enters its third season off the back of an unexpected but most welcome relatively successful second season in which it took a second place and set a fastest lap - in part due to the Mercedes engine in the back but also down to the rather tidy package that was the VJM02. Anyway, back to the 2010 season and the team will be hoping against hope for more of the same. First off the team has an unchanged line-up from the end of last year with the same technical team, engine, gearbox and drivers. Giancarlo Fisichella, the hero of the hour at Spa, left last year for Ferrari to be replaced by Vitantonio Liuzzi while Adrian Sutil enters his third year with the team.

The VJM03 is in the mould of a typical 2010 car with a large shark fin engine cover (coincidentally good for sponsor graphics), the wide front wing and the tall and narrow rear wing. Again in orange, white and green (the colours of India's flag) the car is packaged neatly with the Mercedes V10 and McLaren gearbox providing the motive power. As with all the other teams, Force India have ad to adopt a larger fuel tank to accommodate something in the region of 55 gallons of fuel (that's five times what my Ford Focus can hold).

Adrian Sutil enters his fourth season in F1 and his third with Force India, having raced for the team in 2007 in its previous guise as Spyker F1. Last year's experience was not a good one, with a number of mechanical retirements and more than one accident, although after his team mate Fisichella took second at Spa he brought home his car in fourth place at Monza, setting the fastest lap of the race along the way. Next year he should be considering a move up the grid, but to do so he must become more consistent and a bit less accident-prone.

Vitantonio Liuzzi has a bit of a chequered history in F1. His first drive was a shared race seat with Scott Speed at Red Bull in 2005, before moving to a full-time race seat with Toro Rosso for 2006-07. 2008 saw him on the sidelines as Force India's test driver, a role repeated in 2009 before Giancarlo Fisichella left the team for Ferrari, allowing Liuzzi to compete in the final five races of the season. As an F1 driver he has proved to be a fighter at times, but has also been plagued by a number of unforced errors, which contributed to him losing his race seat at Toro Rosso at the end of 2007. Consistency is the key if he is to carve out a long-term career at the top of the motorsport ladder.

Force India turned a lot of heads up and down the pit lane with an outstanding performance against the odds in 2009 with a car that was particularly good on high speed circuits. The team have tried to carry those attributes through into the 2010 car whilst working on improving low and medium speed handling. If the team has achieved their goals they will again be turning heads up and down the pit lane, and hoping for another haul of points. Make no mistake that the team will be pulling out all the stops to achieve just that.

author: Phil Haigh