A1 Team Lebanon, with driver Daniel Morad, finished the day shaking their heads with despair. After setting the pace yesterday and continuing to run in the lead group this morning, the team were confident that they had all the ingredients for their best ever qualifying result. However, yet again bad luck struck the team when a persistent engine misfire halted the team’s participation in the qualifying session.

The team stayed on the pace in the further practice session this morning, with Morad finishing third quickest, however the engine developed a misfire in the last few moments. In the break between the final practice and qualifying sessions the team checked and even replaced virtually all relevant components, systems and software in an attempts to remedy the problem and were working closely with Ferrari. Even after the qualifying sessions the problem had not been resolved leaving the team to work through the night to resolve the mysterious faults before Sunday’s race.

Morad said of the team’s misfortunes, “I’m totally gutted. I just don’t know what to say. We were expecting to go into qualifying with a great shot at the first two rows, and possibly a pole. I can only hope that we’ve had the back luck now and that we’ll have better luck for tomorrow and the next few races. The Sprint race won’t give us much opportunity for points, but it will be frustrating for us tomorrow in the Feature race. We have shown to have a top running pace and we’ll be behind much slower cars at the start. We’ll have to work our way forwards, but on this track it won’t be easy. The corners are high speed, so it won’t be easy for passing. All we can do is try our best and score points, as that’s what we really need to do.”

Luke Craft, Team Principal, added, “We’ve had more than our fair share of bad luck this season and we’re all very disappointed that an engine misfire put paid to our chances of securing very strong qualifying positions for tomorrow’s races. It’s very tough on Daniel who hasn’t put a foot wrong all weekend, yet ends up at the back of the grid. He has the grit and determination to race for the best finish possible, but we’ll need our luck to change if we’re going to score points.”

A1 Team Lebanon and 19 other nations will be racing tomorrow at the A1GP World Cup of Motorsport, South Africa at the historic Kyalami circuit. The Sprint race is a 30 minutes race with one pitstop in the morning and the Feature race later in the afternoon is 70 minutes of hard racing and includes two pitstops.