Both Force India drivers were critical of their car's balance after a tough opening practice day for the Italian Grand Prix.
While Sergio Perez set the fifth best time in the first Friday practice session, in the second session both Force India drivers struggled on headline times, them finishing up 12th and 13th with Nico Hulkenberg ahead, at a track that many thought in advance would suit them.
"It's just crap" said Hulkenberg when asked what was wrong with the balance.
And when asked whether it was the front or rear of the car that was lacking grip, Hulkenberg replied: "It's a bit of both. At the moment we're not very happy with it so we've got a bit of work to do, a bit of tuning."
His team mate Perez concurred. "This morning I think we were one of the few cars to run the supersoft tyre" said the Mexican of his apparently strong showing in the first session. "Generally I haven't been very happy and comfortable with the car balance, there is a lot of room to improve the mechanical balance on there. That's our target, to figure out a nicer balance through cornering, high speed to low speed.
"You are running very low downforce around here so your balance is very important.
"This weekend we are having more doubts [than usual with the low downforce spec] on where to put the mechanical balance together with the aero balance. There is a lot of work to be done in the next couple of hours to try to figure out a nice balance.
Perez added that the Pirelli tyre pressure restrictions may be part of the team's struggle. "I'm finding this weekend quite hard in terms of balancing each of the compounds" he said, "they're working very differently, low fuel to high fuel; they're requiring very different things.
"For us, and especially in my case, it has not been easy to figure out what I need in terms of low fuel performance [and] high fuel performance, so there is a lot of analysis to be done, and a lot of thinking and decisions to take for tomorrow."
"It was a bit of a shock to see that basically McLaren, Haas, Williams they seem to have the upper hand on us this weekend."
