Ireland’s Adam Carroll dominated the qualifying sessions for tomorrow’s Great Britain round of the A1GP World Cup of Motorsport and will start both the Sprint and Feature races from the favoured pole position.
Mexico (Salvador Duran) will start the first, shorter race alongside Ireland on the front row of the grid with row two to be occupied by Netherlands (Jeroen Bleekemolen) and USA (John R Hildebrand Jr).
South Africa, with Alan van der Merwe at the wheel of Vulindlela, qualified 19th for the Sprint race and 12th for the Feature race. The 29-year-old, standing in for regular driver Adrian Zaugg, who is competing in the World Series by Renault at Spa-Francorchamps in Belgium this weekend, took time to get to grips with the new Powered by Ferrari car after a long break from A1GP (he last drove for South Africa in Shanghai in round 10 of season two in 2007).
“I’m really enjoying driving the new Powered by Ferrari car for the first time,” said Van der Merwe. “It’s taking a bit longer than I would have liked to settle into the new car and get it set up to my liking. It’s very different to the A1GP car I drove more than 18 months ago. We’ve managed to improve our lap times with each outing.”
Van de Merwe, British F3 champion in 2003, was one of the first on to the circuit in the final qualifying session and, with the aid of the PowerBoost button unique to A1GP, was able to record his fastest lap of the weekend so far to South Africa in 12th place out of 20 nations for Sunday afternoon’s Feature race.
Sunday’s sprint and feature races will be broadcast on SABC3 from 15h00 to 17h30 (the recorded sprint race will be screened from 15h00 while the feature race will be live from 16h00).
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