Great Teamwork Gifts Malaysia Best Ever 4th Qualifying Position

Alex on Malaysia's first ever second row start for Sprint race

A1 Team Malaysia achieved its best ever qualifying position today with 4th at the USA A1 Grand Prix in Laguna Seca Speedway near San Francisco today (Saturday).

Malaysia's Alex Yoong firmly attributed this success solely on the great teamwork which enabled a much improved setup to the car compared to the two practice sessions yesterday and this morning, saying, "The whole team collective have worked hard over the last two days to steadily improve the car's setup and a great improvement was found from the second practice session this morning to put us in this good position to score more points in the run-in to the championship."

"I'm very happy with this qualifying result but credit goes to the whole team." Yoong added.

Malaysia will line up alongside New Zealand on the second row with Mexico, who won its maiden pole position, and France on the front row.

Meanwhile A1 Team Malaysia has strongly refuted that pit-stop efforts have hampered better results for the team. The team's principal, Jack Cunningham and Yoong have both defended the team's pit-stop performance. "The crew cannot be blamed as the thread design on the wheel nut is not designed for tyre changing under high temperature in race condition." said Cunningham.

Yoong said that the other top running teams also had similar problems and added, "The team did very well in the pit-stops in Indonesia and Malaysia and were not the slowest in the last few races. Overall I'm happy with the crew's performance under these very arduous conditions."

Max Revson stands corrected.

Max Revson

USA Qualifying Results
A1 Team/Driver/Aggregate Time
1 Mexico Salvador Duran 2.30.744
2 France Nicolas Lapierre 2.30.895
3 New Zealand Matt Halliday 2.31.596
4 Malaysia Alex Yoong 2.31.810
5 Australia Ryan Briscoe 2.31.964
6 Great Britain Robbie Kerr 2.31.970
7 Portugal Alvaro Parente 2.32.042
8 Ireland Ralph Firman 2.32.098
9 Germany Timo Scheider 2.32.307
10 S. Africa Stephen Simpson 2.32.535
11 Lebanon Graham Rahal 2.32.560
12 Netherlands Jos Verstappen 2.32.571
13 Italy Max Papis 2.32.745
14 Czech Republic Tomas Enge 2.32.838
15 Indonesia Ananda Mikola 2.33.249
16 Switzerland Giorgio Mondini 2.33.299
17 USA Bryan Herta 2.33.602
18 Canada Patrick Carpentier 2.33.641
19 Brazil Christian Fittipaldi 2.33.686
20 Austria Mathias Lauda 2.34.338
21 Pakistan Adam Khan 2.36.325
22 China Tengyi Jiang 2.37.715

Despite a regulation which allows A1 Teams to switch drivers between Qualifying and the Sprint race, all teams have decided to retain their qualifying selection and there will be no driver changes. The Sprint race will be contested over 50 miles lasting up to 30 minutes in duration. With a rolling start at 13.30 PST (Malaysian Time 5.30am Monday), tomorrow’s race will be run over 22 laps of the 3.6 km circuit.

The outcome of the race determines the grid positions for the Feature race which will start at 15.00 PST (Malaysian Time 7.00am Monday) with a standing start. The Feature race will be run over 100 miles (44 laps) lasting up to 60 minutes in duration.