Bruno Junqueira will line up on the eighth row of the grid for tomorrow’s A1GP World Cup of Motorsport sprint race at the Brands Hatch circuit in England. After a frantic day, which included changing the team’s car between morning practice and qualifying, Bruno qualified in 16th position.
After struggling again in morning practice, following the pattern of results that has blighted the team throughout the 2006/07 season, A1GP officials agreed together with the Team Brasil engineering crew that a complete chassis change was required. The crew frantically prepared the car in the hours before this afternoon’s qualifying, therefore Bruno headed into qualifying with no practice in a new car.
Despite this, Bruno set the 14th fastest time in the first segment of qualifying, and was up to 13th after segment two. He fell back to 14th after the third segment, although he did improve his overall combined time, and then headed out four minutes before the end of the final session to set his lap to determine his grid slot for tomorrow’s sprint race. He set his fastest time of the weekend with a lap of 1:15.528 but, in an extremely competitive session, and with his limited time in the new car, it was only good enough for 16th spot.
The sprint race will begin tomorrow at 11am local time, with the feature race following on tomorrow afternoon at 3pm. The results of the sprint race will be used to set the grid for the feature race.
Bruno Junqueira: “The new car is better already I think. I was running a second faster than before. I haven’t had a chance to test the car obviously, having gone straight into qualifying, but already I can feel that the balance is better. Unfortunately on my third qualifying lap I made a small mistake, and without that I think we could have been 11th or 12th, so we are improving. ”
Emerson Fittipaldi: “We have made a big improvement. Today we were one second from the quickest car whereas yesterday we were two seconds away. Bruno has to get used to the new car, he told me that he was too conservative on the two fastest corners, so we should go faster tomorrow. It’s a shame we are starting from 16th, but we will have a good car for the race tomorrow. ”
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