A1 Team Brazil’s Felipe Guimarães today qualified for this weekend’s A1GP Taupo event at the Taupo Motorsports Park in New Zealand. He will begin tomorrow’s Sprint race from the seventh row of the grid and the Feature race from the sixth row.

The day kicked off with a final practice session, which the team used to continue preparations and set-up work ahead of the afternoon qualifying. At the fifteen minute mark Felipe briefly topped the table, but as the session progressed he slipped down the standings. With twenty minutes to go he was back up to sixth but a late flurry of fast laps, and four teams bolting on a fresh set of rubber put Felipe down to 12th position with a time of 1:16.695 after completing 29 laps on the 3.32km track.

In the Sprint race qualifying, he set a lap of 1:16.346 in the first segment and was sitting in provisional eighth spot. He improved his time in the second segment by three tenths to record a time of 1:16.074, but as other drivers improved further, he was relegated to 13th spot by the end of the session, setting himself up on the seventh row of the grid for the 25-minute Sprint race tomorrow morning.

Heading out late into first segment of qualifying for the Feature race, Felipe set a time of 1:16.305 to take provisional 12th. Although improving his time by more than half a second in the fourth and final segment, his lap of 1:15.812 was not enough to move up the table and he remained in 12th spot, so will line up on the sixth row for the Feature.

Felipe Guimarães: “ This morning was a little better than yesterday and we made improvements with the brakes and other things. Unfortunately qualifying was not what I was hoping it to be. I thought we would be in the top ten at least. Now we have to work on the data, see what the problem is and hope to have a good race tomorrow.”

Emerson Fittipaldi, Team Principal: “We are off pace and unfortunately are a second behind the leaders so something is wrong on the basic set-up. We are running strong on old tyres but don’t make as much of an improvement on new tyres as other teams. We need to work on the set-up and find a jump in the lap times by tomorrow.”

Sprint Race Qualifying
1. Ireland 1:15.507
2. Netherlands +0.265
3. Portugal +0.281
13. Brazil +1.567

Feature Race Qualifying
1. Ireland 1:14.411
2. Netherlands +-.265
3. Portugal +0.432
12. Brazil +1.401

Brazil – Free Practice 3
Laps: 29 Position: 12th Fastest Lap: 1:16.695 (+1.683)