Sergio Perez says he "out-qualified the car by a couple of places" after securing fourth on the grid for the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.
Perez has looked strong all weekend and could even have been third were it not for Kimi Raikkonen's lap in the final moments of Q3. His Force India team-mate Nico Hulkenberg could only qualify seventh.
Despite being happy with his qualifying performance Perez thinks Force India will need to take a measured approach to the race with faster cars starting directly behind.
"I'm forward to tomorrow, I think we have out-qualified the car pace by a couple of places," Perez said. "Tomorrow will be very difficult to keep the quick cars behind but anything can happen and my main objective is to get Kimi at the start.
"If we start fighting from lap one onwards and we stop protecting the tyres we might deg off the tyre completely and ruin our race. So it's going to be a matter of going to do our own race and try to maintain first of all the position but if there's anything better than that we will try to take it."
Though he is known as one of the best drivers on the grid for managing tyres Perez says this has been an area of concern for Force India all weekend.
Asked if he could do much with strategy on Sunday, he replied: "I don't think so. I think our degradation is quite poor, it's not something which is great for us at the moment. I don't know where we are going to end up but I'm confident we are going to take the most out of tomorrow.
"All the changes we've done, I think we went in the right direction. We had a very poor weekend in Sao Paulo and did a very deep analysis from that and learned a lot of things. I think today it shows we have learned something from a poor weekend, which is important."