Force India is confident that missing second practice in Bahrain will
not impact too much on its competitiveness for the rest of the weekend.
The team has elected not to run in Friday afternoon's session at
Sakhir in the wake of the incident on Wednesday when members of its crew
were caught up with protestors.
Force India completed a soft tyre run - which would usually be saved
for Friday afternoon - in the morning session, and is now converting its
cars to Saturday specification before the team leaves the circuit
early.
Chief engineer Jakob Andreasen said Force India had made sure it did
enough work in the morning to compensate for the lack of practice two
running.
"We have pretty much used up our tyre allocation this morning, which
has given us all the data we need heading into tomorrow when we can
hopefully deliver a strong qualifying performance," he said.
Although a Force India statement said it was missing practice two
"for logistical reasons the team will run a rescheduled programme for
the rest of the weekend, which will result in the team missing second
practice to ensure the most competitive performance in FP3, qualifying
and the race", deputy team principal Bob Fernley told reporters earlier
in the day that a desire to travel back from the circuit before darkness
was the key factor.
"We are looking at it from the point of view of ensuring the well
being of everybody and the comfort of everybody is in place. And that is
the key objective for us," he said.
"We have had issues as you all know with things, and we have to make
sure that the crew are comfortable in the environment and that is what
we are working on."
Fernley added: "We are doing the best we can to make sure the crew
are safe. We have assurances and I don't believe there will be any
issues. There will be protests and I think it was an unfortunate
incident, but unfortunate incidents happen. When it is your team it
happens to, you have to deal with it in a proper manner which is what we
are doing."
Source: Autosport.com
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