• Force India

Liuzzi reverts to old chassis to solve handling issues

Tonio Liuzzi is hoping his old chassis will allow him to return to form © Sutton Images

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• Feature:
• Back to the drawing board - Tonio Liuzzi's exclusive column
  

• Race:
• Canadian Grand Prix

• Championship:
• FIA Formula One World Championship

• Drivers:
• Tonio Liuzzi

• Teams:
• Racing Point

Tonio Liuzzi will revert to using his old Force India chassis at the Canadian Grand Prix, in an attempt to cure his handling problems.

Since Liuzzi started using a new chassis at the Spanish Grand Prix he has struggled for rear-end grip and only scored points at the Monaco Grand Prix, while team-mate Adrian Sutil scored at all three events in the same timeframe. Liuzzi will now switch back to the car he used at the first four races, in the hope it will solve the issue.

"The last few races have been pretty tough as we've been struggling with a general lack of grip that makes it hard for me to give the maximum," Liuzzi said. "Monaco was OK and I thought we had solved the issues so it was quite frustrating in Turkey that I couldn't make the most of our new development items. We've put in some long hours at the factory and found some minor damage on the chassis that we picked up in Monaco. We thought we had fixed it but as a precaution we are switching back to the chassis I used in the first four races. We'll look at the chassis again back in the factory and see if we can find any other areas we need to address."

With a fully working chassis, he expects to be fighting with the Renaults and challenging for points.

"I don't think we lost as much ground to Renault in Turkey as it might have seemed and I think Adrian showed that we still have a top ten package over a full race distance," he added. "If I can get the grip I need I hope I'll be back knocking on the door of Q3 and in the hunt for points. As we've seen before Canada is pretty unpredictable and if we are up at the front we could get some really decent points, hopefully another double points finish, which will be good for the team at this stage."

Liuzzi used Force India's version of the F-duct/switchable rear wing (SRW) in Turkey but Sutil chose not to. Sutil said he was planning to use it in Montreal to get the highest possible top speed on the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve's long straights.

"The SRW was a development item in Turkey and we didn't use it on my car in qualifying or the race as we didn't get enough information on it after the various issues we had in practice," said Sutil. "It's a really good system for me as I can use it without taking my hands off the steering wheel and once we introduce it long-term it will be very easy to use. We saw on Tonio's car that it gave a big improvement, so if we can use it on my car it will be a real step forward. We will test it some more in Canada and hopefully get some good data together."

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