After an aborted start when South Africa’s Alan van der Merwe stalled on the grid, the race finally got underway with Carroll getting off the line to lead into Paddock Hill Bend. As the field came through the first corner an incident involving China, USA and India left China and India in the gravel and out the race and brought out the Safety Car as the cars came round to complete the first lap. USA’s John R Hildebrand Jr limped back to the pits for a new nose cone but rejoined the race.
The order behind the Safety Car was Ireland from Monaco, Netherlands, Switzerland, Portugal, New Zealand, Australia, France, Great Britain and Italy.
Ireland had a good run out of the final corner on the restart to come across the line 0.653-seconds ahead of the chasing pack. Further down the field Mexico’s Salvador Duran took tenth from Italy’s Vitantonio Liuzzi.
Ireland’s Adam Carroll said: “It was a perfect weekend for us, it’s what we needed to come here to do, it was the plan so it really did come through. We knew by the pace we set in Portugal that if we came here and everything worked out ok we would be really hard to beat, and that was the way it worked out so it couldn’t have been better.
“I didn’t get a great start again, it’s really hard to start from pole, but I knew if I stayed where I was there wouldn’t be any bumping in to each other.
“In the second pit stop the team were nothing to do with why we were slow, the guys did their job but had to hold me because Switzerland was coming in and if they had let me go it would have been very dangerous so we lost some time.
“The team are just unbelievable, they are the best team on the face of this earth in motorsport and I believe that fully. Their commitment is second to none and we are the best in this pit lane. These guys left on Friday night after 29 hours in the pit lane, that says it all.”
Pos A1 Team Driver Laps 1 IRELAND Adam Carroll 49 2 NETHERLANDS Jeroen Bleekemolen 49 3 SWITZERLAND Neel Jani 49 4 MONACO Clivio Piccione 49 5 PORTUGAL Filipe Albuquerque 49 6 MEXICO Salvador Duran 49 7 GREAT BRITAIN Daniel Clarke 49 8 AUSTRALIA John Martin 49 9 ITALY Vitantonio Liuzzi 49 10 FRANCE Nicolas Prost 49 11 SOUTH AFRICA Alan Van Der Merwe 49 12 LEBANON Daniel Morad 49 13 INDONESIA Satrio Hermanto 48 14 USA John R. Hildebrand Jr. 48 15 MALAYSIA Aaron Lim 27 16 GERMANY Michael Ammermuller 26 17 NEW ZEALAND Earl Bamber 6 18 CHINA Congfu Cheng 0 19 INDIA Narain Karthikeyan 0 BRAZIL Felipe Guimaraes 0
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