Abu Dhabi: Force India's Adrian Sutil and Paul di Resta showed promise ahead of the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix on Sunday, setting the eighth and ninth-fastest time in the second free practice session on Friday.
Germany's Sutil finished eighth with the fastest lap time of 1m 40.951s, just ahead of di Resta, who clocked 1m 41.021s to finish ninth in the incident-packed practice session.
Sutil had managed a seventh-place finish in the team's first practice session clocking 1m 41.340s, while the Scottish driver Resta came ninth with 1m 42.151s.
"The track had very low grip to begin with, but we found quite a good baseline starting point with the car right away. The main focus was on improving the traction out of the low-speed corners because that's what this circuit is all about. We also worked a lot on finding the optimum wing levels and seem to have found a good solution so far," said Sutil after the second practice session.
Di Resta said, "I think looking at where we've ended up we should be pretty happy with today's work. In the first session I was struggling with rear grip and it wasn't easy to lean on the car. But in the second session we started to get on top of those issues and got quite close to a decent set-up."
McLaren's Lewis Hamilton (1m 39.586s) topped the times in the second practice session, outpacing his nearest rival and team-mate Jenson Button (1m 39.785s) by two-tenths of a second. The two drivers dominated the day, with Button fastest in the morning and second-quickest in the afternoon.
Red Bull's Sebastian Vettel and Spaniard Fernando Alonso of Ferrari both crashed into the barriers at Turn One during the session but escaped unhurt.
Alonso finished third fastest with a timing of 1m 39.971s while his team-mate Brazilian Felipe Massa came fourth clocking 1m 39.980s.
Australian Mark Webber was fifth quickest for the Red Bull with a timing of 1m 40.104s.
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