Liuzzi reflects on his 2010 season

There’s no question that Tonio Liuzzi had a lot of bad luck in 2010, and on several occasions he was the innocent victim of mistakes by others – notably in Montreal, where he had qualified a brilliant fifth. Nevertheless he put in some great races, including a memorable run to sixth in Korea, and in total he finished in the points on six occasions. We asked for his thoughts on the year.

Q: It’s been a long and eventful season for you and the Force India team. How would you sum it up?

We had a lot of ups and downs this year. We started really strongly, and it was a shame that we lost a few points in the middle of the season when I think the car was at its best. Maybe everybody was expecting us to fly again like last year in races like Spa and Monza, but we were obviously aware that the all other teams didn’t sleep. We were in a similar condition there to all the other circuits, and I think the development of the F-Duct didn’t help us, because everybody was fast on the straight, so we lost a bit of the advantage that we had last year. We were still highly motivated and targeting really high and I think in the end we had a really strong season, and I’m proud of it for sure. Nobody expected that we could be fighting for sixth in the constructors’ championship.

Q: Did other teams simply develop their cars faster over the course of the year?

We kept developing as well as we could. We made a lot of progress, but people forget that we are a team with 280 people, and in the beginning we were fighting with Renault and Mercedes, teams that were past World Champions who were investing a huge amount of money. We did everything perfectly, we kept going forward, but the others made bigger steps. It was a shame that we lost sixth position right at the end.

Q: In 2009 there were some big updates that really made a difference. Did you miss that sort of progress this year?

We started already with a strong package. We had some good updates, in fact in nearly every race we brought good updates. But when you are so far behind, as we were in 2009, it’s much easier to bring updates and find lap time. When you are closer to the leaders then everything becomes tougher. I think there’s a reason for everything in our season. The rest was a really strong season for Force India, and we should be proud of it.

Q: What were the highlights of the year for you?

Korea, Canada, Monaco, these were the highlights. Australia was also a really good and crazy race! At Spa, even though the final result wasn’t what we expected, we had a really good race and a good fight. Overall I think we had a few occasions where we showed that we could compete with the top teams. Also during the races we had some fights with the Red Bull, with Fernando Alonso, with Felipe Massa, and every time we never gave up. These were the highlights of the year. I have nothing to regret with all the other races that didn’t go as we wanted, because there was always a reason why.

Q: You mentioned Canada. You qualified a great fifth there.

Montreal could have been the best race of the year, because we showed an ultra strong performance in dry conditions. We started in fifth place and showed good pace in the race. Unfortunately Massa decided to do that unlucky move at the start. It’s a shame that I was involved in something that I didn’t create, and it killed a possibility to change my season in a way. I’m pretty sure that we could have finished in the top four, even better than where we started. It was a really disappointing race where we didn’t achieve what we deserved. We had a lot of races where we showed a strong performance, but we had a lot of things that didn’t go towards us, but I say again, I don’t regret anything this year. I think we showed that when the car is 100% I’m 100% there, and ready to show a good performance.