Paul di Resta believes he would have been able to score points in the Belgian Grand Prix even with a damaged Force India, had he not been caught out by the safety car.
The Scot's car was hit by Timo Glock in an incident that caused damage to several other cars further down the order, and led to Glock being given a drive-through penalty. Di Resta reckons the after-effects of the clash hampered the rest of his afternoon, but that he could still have beaten eventual 10th-place finisher Pastor Maldonado.
"I got off the line very well and everything seemed to be going quite smoothly," said di Resta. "But there was an incident ahead of me and I thought I had managed to get through the corner when I got hit hard by Timo. That put a big whole in the floor, damaged my front wing and gave me a lot of understeer.
"Other than that the pace of the car was quite strong, but I was a bit unlucky with the safety car because the priority had to go to the leading car [in the team] and I dropped behind the Williams. Without that I could have probably been ahead of Maldonado."
Di Resta's teammate Adrian Sutil came through from 15th on the grid to seventh.
"It was an exciting race with lots of action, but we had a good strategy and made the right calls at the right time," said the German. "When the safety car came out I pitted straight away, which helped me because I made up a couple of places. I came out in sixth and after that I only lost one position to [Michael] Schumacher, who was on the soft tire and faster than me.
"Overall I think that this result is a fair reflection of the pace we have had this weekend and it's nice to have recovered from the problems we had yesterday to leave here with these important points."