Brazil

A1 Team Brasil's Sergio Jimenez will begin tomorrow's sprint and feature races at Eastern Creek from 11th and ninth places respectively after suffering grip problems in today's qualifying.

For this morning's final one-hour practice session, the team used on high mileage tyres and ran short qualifying runs before moving onto bedding in brakes for qualifying and the feature race. The team made some improvements throughout the session and finished up ninth fastest, with a best lap of 1:21.085.

In the first sprint race qualifying segment, the majority of drivers waited until the last minutes of the session to go out on track. He set a lap of 1:19.626 on new tyres, putting him in provisional 11th position. The team made some small changes to the car for the next session and Sergio was able to improve his lap by almost a second, setting a time of 1:18.811. However, in an extremely competitive session, he was not able to improve on his grid position and will therefore line up on the sixth row of the grid.

Heading into first qualifying for the feature race, the team released Sergio several seconds later than originally planned, which caused him to get caught up in traffic. However, later in the lap he was blocked by the Team Canada car, ruining his lap. Canada was later penalised for the incident and Sergio's fourth segment time of 1:19.235 placed him in ninth position, on the fifth row for the feature race.

Sergio Jimenez: "I don't understand why we always seem to struggle in qualifying. I had problems in the middle sector and problems with the grip under acceleration. The car and myself improved by the second segment, but I didn't have enough grip for the whole of qualifying. Our race pace is good so now we just have to focus on tomorrow's races. With old tyres we are fast and I am feeling pretty confident."

Gary Davies, Race Engineer: "In the first session we were really finding ourselves on new tyres. We made a small change to the car and went out in the second session on new tyres. We improved by still struggled in the middle sector. We went out on old tyres in the third segment, but we released Sergio too late which put him in traffic. It looked like a reasonable lap but then Canada blocked him so we lost that lap. In the last session we had new tyres and made a small change to the car. The sectors were not too bad but we were still losing time in the middle. Our race pace is always good so I am not concerned about tomorrow but we are a little disappointed with our qualifying positions."

Canada

Qualifying for Round 6 of the 2007-08 A1GP World Cup of Motorsport proved to be dramatic for A1 Team Canada with Robert Wickens collecting a 15th place Sprint start followed by 21st on the grid for Sunday's Feature race after a penalty for blocking dropped him from eighth at Australia's Eastern Creek International Raceway.

With Canada sitting 12th overall in the A1GP Nations Standings and Toronto's Wickens collecting two podium finishes in his first six race starts, the team was hoping for another strong qualifying outing to target two points scoring finishes at the 3.93km track tomorrow. Sprint qualifying initially looked promising with Robert sixth fastest after his first run but he'd ultimately drop back to 15th on the grid after his second run with the pole going to France's Loic Duval.

Feature qualifying was a more competitive affair for Canada with Wickens overcoming grip issues to collect a fourth row grid start with the eighth fastest time from the 22 nations but he was subsequently penalized by the race stewards for ignoring blue flags blocking Brazil in the process. Stripped of the eighth fastest time, Canada is left languishing down in 21st for the 70-minute Feature race with New Zealand's Jonny Reid on pole.

Commenting after qualifying Wickens said; "We were struggling a lot more than expected and now we have two very tough grid slots. We made improvements through the whole session but we obviously still have some work to do. It just seemed we couldn't quite get a hold on track conditions like some others could, struggling with overall grip. The balance was pretty decent it was just the grip level wasn't there."

Simon Cayzer, Canada's Team Manager reflected; "We did quite a lot of work this morning on older tires to try and help with our race pace. We're still struggling with tire drop off, and not getting the level of grip consistently that we need to be running at the top. We're going to do a bit of analysis tonight and see if we can put a good race car together for Robert as that's what he needs. We did make some changes in the last outing which gave us P8, but with the penalty things are tougher!"

Czech Republic

Tomas Enge managed to get one top 10 grid position at Eastern Creek after he set 9th time in the feature qualifying. The Czech team will start 14th in the Sprint. The Czech team struggled with grip on Friday and Saturday's practice showed a slight improvement. However, the main focus was on race setup and Enge was running for majority of the session with full fuel tank and the team was playing with the ride height on bumpy Australian track. He did 22 laps with best time 1:21,733 and ended 16th.

First two qualifying segments decided as usual about the sprint race grid. Enge's best time 1:19,099 was set in the second run and was within a second of the pole winning time. The Czech team finished 14th. The sun went out in the meantime and the track temperature was considerable higher for the feature qualifying. Lap times were slower as a result. Enge set his best in the last run and 1:19,232 put the Czech to the fifth row on the grid, six tenths shy of the pole position.