The fourth season of the A1GP World Cup of Motorsport gets underway
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.”
Unfortunately there will be no rookie driver session at Zandvoort due to the noise restrictions in the seaside resort.
Incumbent
rookie driver Wesleigh Orr looked a shoe-in for the role again this
season until a late change of regulations by A1GP saw the rookie age
limit deleted.
“From the inception of Formula Volkswagen we
made it clear we would consider the top candidates from that category,”
said Carroll.
“High downforce single seater experience is
critical to us. We are very pleased that Wesleigh justified our faith
in him by clearly dominating everyone of similar age, but with the
removal of the age restriction, Wesleigh has suddenly found he needs to
compete with the more experienced campaigners in the class, not only on
the local circuits but also for the rookie seat.
“We decided
rather than to take Wesleigh to Zandvoort where there would be no
rookie session, to allow him to compete locally in the Formula
Volkswagen races on the same weekend – this provides us with another
window to assess the performance of the stand-out quartet of Gavin
Cronje, Cristiano Morgado, Michael Stephen and Wesleigh,” added Carroll.
