Earning points will be a difficult task for Force India drivers in the inaugural South Korean Grand Prix as Adrian Sutil and Tonio Liuzzi will start 14th and 17th respectively on the grid on Sunday.
Sutil manged to sneak into Q2 but Liuzzi settled for his position in first qualifying. The Italian had finished 18th but moved up a place following a five place penalty on Renault's Vitaly Petrov.
Sutil was 15th in the first qualifying but could not get into the Qualifying 3 and settled for the 14th position.
Red Bull's Sebastian Vettel grabbed the pole position ahead of teammate Mark Webber. Ferrari's Fernando Alonso will start third.
"Although P14 isn't exactly what we would have hoped for, we were still quite close to the top 12 and with a bit of luck could have been even closer to Q3. In Q2 I had some traffic on my first lap and then my second was good, but it was tough out there with the tyres," Sutil said.
Talking about the track for the first ever F1 race here, Sutil said, "It's a great track they have built here. I really enjoyed driving on it -- there's a lot of challenges and kinks and it was really so grippy at the end of the session that it was a real pleasure to drive each lap."
Liuzzi also blamed the tyre selection for the result.
"We suffered with a lot of graining on the soft tyres today. We missed out on the last run in the morning because of a puncture and didn't try the option tyres, but we didn't expect them to grain as badly as they did," he said.
Force India chairman and team principal Vijay Mallya was hopeful of a good outcome.
"We're still in a good position for the race tomorrow and I'm very hopeful of us doing well. I am sure the race will throw up a lot of unusual opportunities and we've got to be well poised to take anything that comes our way," he said.
