While Vitantonio Liuzzi claimed Italy’s first ever A1GP pole position for tomorrow’s Vodafone A1GP Algarve, Portugal, South Africa’s Adrian Zaugg delivered his best qualifying performance of the season and will start Sunday’s Sprint race in eighth position and the feature race in fourth.

Liuzzi, making his first appearance for his country, topped the time sheets after the two Sprint race qualifying segments with a lap time of 1m 33,291s. Second was Robert Doornbos of the Netherlands (+0,471s) and third was Ireland’s Adam Carroll (+0,725s). Zaugg, at the wheel of A1 Team South Africa’s distinctively liveried Vulindlela, was 1m 0,426s off the pace.

Doornbos scored his first pole position for the Feature race with a time of 1m 30,415s, ahead of Carroll (+0,281s), Switzerland’s Neel Jani (+0,463s) and Zaugg (+0,569s).

Portugal’s Filipe Albuquerque will start s home event from fifth and seventh respectively.

Zaugg was delighted with the team’s best qualifying result of the season. “We’ve worked hard to get ourselves back to the level we were at last season and I have to thank my team for a good car today” said the 21-year-old South African.

“I thought we could have done better in the Sprint race qualifying, but fourth on the grid for the Feature race is a great reward for all our efforts. Now we need to convert this into a good race result”.

Team manager Mike Carroll declared himself more than satisfied. “It’s good to put together a more competitive qualifying performance. We will be putting all our focus on helping Adrian to turn this opportunity into some worthwhile points in the two races tomorrow.”

Sunday’s races will be broadcast on SABC3 from 15.00 to 17.30 (the recorded Sprint race will be screened from 15.00 while the Feature race will be live from 16.00).