Sahara Force India witnessed a relatively good outing with Sergio Perez and Nico Hulkenberg finishing seventh and ninth respectively in the qualifying session of the Italian Grand Prix here today.
Both Perez and Hulkenberg made it to the third qualifying session.
While Perez recorded his best timing of 1:24.626s in the final qualifying session, Hulkenberg was a tad slow clocking 1:25.317s in Q3.
Mercedes' Lewis Hamilton will start tomorrow's Italian GP from pole position after beating Ferrari's Kimi Raikkonen by just over two-tenths of a second. It was Hamilton's seventh consecutive pole, his fourth at Monza and his 11th of the season.
Raikkonen edged Ferrari teammate Sebastian Vettel by just five-hundredths of a second, with the second Mercedes of Nico Rosberg - handicapped by having to revert to an old-spec engine after a problem in FP3 - fourth.
The Williams of Felipe Massa and Valtteri Bottas will form the third row, followed by Perez and Romain Grosjean of Lotus.
Force India's Hulkenberg was hit by technical woes and finished ninth, with Sauber's Marcus Ericsson - penalised three grid places for blocking Hulkenberg in Q1 - completing the top ten.
Perez was realtively satisfied with his outing today.
"I am pretty happy with the job I did today in qualifying. I was able to improve my time in every session and each lap was pretty good. In Q3 I was a bit too optimistic and tried to get a tow from Kimi on the straight but it didn't work. It actually cost me a couple of tenths but in any case it wouldn't have been enough to be in front of the two Williams cars," Perez said.
"The race will be hard, but our target should be to challenge Williams ahead of us. The b-spec car has been performing solidly in the past few races so I see no reason why we shouldn't be in a position to have a good performance tomorrow. A good start will be crucial as the strategy options are quite straightforward; one of the keys of the race will be tyre degradation, but I am confident we will be strong and score good points.
