/ 27 September 2008

Team SA upbeat ahead of A1GP season

The fourth season of the A1GP World Cup of Motorsport gets under way at Zandvoort in The Netherlands this weekend, and South Africa will be hoping that 21-year-old Adrian Zaugg can start the season in exactly the same fashion as he has for the past two seasons — with a win in the Sprint race from pole position.

”Adrian’s performance at Zandvoort in the past two seasons has been nothing short of stupendous,” said Mike Carroll, general manager of A1 Team South Africa. ”Last season there were qualifying sessions where he was more than a second faster than the entire chasing pack — an unbelievable achievement especially in such a high-class field.”

”ZA is sometimes used to represent our country and in Zaugg at Zandvoort it really has worked for us,” said Zaugg.

”Zandvoort has always been good to me and there shouldn’t be any reason for this to change — I know the track really well. It is very early days with the new car and I am itching to see what happens at the first event as it will allow us to more clearly establish our goals for the coming season,” continued the driver, who took South Africa to a fantastic top-five championship position last season.

”Obviously we would like to again improve on our performance this season but the new car does throw an extra variable into the equation.”

A1 Team South Africa will continue its technical alliance with A1 Team France and the Connor Racing organisation, which looked after the two nations’ cars last season. France finished fourth in the points.

”On the technical personnel side we have good continuity with the majority of the team being carried over,” commented Carroll. ”Notably Humphrey Corbett stays on as race engineer after a great job last season and having enjoyed a particularly good relationship with Adrian. Hagen Pischel comes into the team in the position of data engineer and should offer new insight in this area of the game.” — Sapa