Full Throttle

Team Switzerland’s Neel Jani posted the quickest time during the first qual session, then watched as the the tropical rains settled over Sepang. After the three remaining sessions were complete the Swiss team and Jani were sitting on their first A1GP World Cup of Motorsport pole.

Jani set the best aggregate time of 3min 48.962secs to take pole by almost a second ahead of Alex Premat for championship leading Team France with the GP2 regular just managing to get his second lap in before conditions worsened.

Ralph Firman of Team Ireland took advantage of his previous experiance in Asian F3 and the Sepang circuit to a solid third spot on the grid.

The fifth round in the championship sees two driver changes. Team Germany will start DTM star Timo Scheider who replaces Adrian Sutil due to a broken thumb suffered in a sprint race crash at Eastern Creek during round four.

Team Russia is again sitting out the round, the second absence in five events. In a reprise of Germany, it’s due to “prior commitments,” made before joining A1GP, and “technical problems.” If it’s anything like the last absence prior commitments means the driver is at home watching Anna Kournakova videos, and technical difficulties is code for teaching him what the connection is between his brain and his right foot. But that’s just a guess.

Related News: A1GP has won the prestigious MotorSport Award, part of the 2005 Autocar Awards. Sheikh Maktoum’s efforts in creating the new series enabled him to top the World’s Championship winning Renault F1 Team in the voting.

A1GP Broadcast Director, Richard Dorfman, also announced the series is “on the verge of signing a deal for North America as we have three offers on the table, while in Japan we are in final discussions with two separate channels.”

A1 Grand Prix, Auto Racing, Sports

1. Switzerland Jani
2. France Premat
3. Ireland Firman
4. Britain Kerr
5. New Zealand Halliday
6. Netherlands Verstappen
7. Malaysia Yoong
8. Brazil Piquet
9. Portugal Parente
10. Italy Toccacelo
11. Indonesia Mikola
12. USA Herta
13. South Africa Simpson
14. Pakistan Kahn
15. India Ebrahim
16. Germany Scheider
17. Mexico Diaz
18. Czech Enge
19. Japan Shimoda
20. Austria Lauda
21. China Jiang
22. Canada McIntosh
23. Lebanon Beschir
24. Australia Davidson