Brazil

A1 Team Brasil will begin tomorrow's A1 Grand Prix of Nations, Durban, South Africa from the fourth row of the grid after qualifying this afternoon in eighth position.

The day began for A1 Team Brasil with a final one-hour practice session. Weather conditions had turned around overnight from torrential rain to scorching heat and humidity. Track temperatures this afternoon were up as high as 53 degrees. Nelson completed 22 valuable laps for the team in the final practice, but it was a difficult session to set a good time in due to a large number of red flag incidents on the unforgiving street circuit.

Qualifying turned out to be fairly incident free until the final segment. Nelson improved his lap times steadily throughout the segments, and was 12th overall after the third segment. In the final qualifying red flag periods caused by Team USA and Team Austria caused a lot of traffic in the last eight minutes of the session, with 21 cars on track. This promised to make it difficult for Team Brasil to improve on its time, however Nelson set a lap time of 1:19.246, his best of the qualifying, and moved the team up to eighth overall.

Tomorrow's sprint race will begin at 1.30pm local time, with the longer feature race beginning at 3pm.

Nelson Piquet Jr: "I would like to have been higher on the grid tomorrow, as I think it's going to be difficult to overtake in the race, but I'm happy we are improving our times. The boys worked hard on the car after practice yesterday and we did a lot of laps in practice this morning. The race will be hard, there will be lots of accidents, so we will have to make sure we stay out of trouble. I hope we can have a good race."

Emerson Fittipaldi: "Qualifying was quite good for us. Nelson was improving with every section, he did his best lap in the last section, and we finished 8th overall. Nelson is much more confident now, he is feeling good. It will be dry tomorrow so it should be good for us. The car is oversteering a little bit too much and there are some other improvements we will make for tomorrow, but overall we are happy. The spectators here are great, today was an incredible crowd for a Saturday and we will have a full house tomorrow. I think there will be a lot of accidents tomorrow but I think we can have a really good race."

Netherlands

A1 Team Netherlands will start the Sprint race of the A1 Grand Prix of Nations Durban from a fourth gid position. With that place the team sets the best result in qualifying this season. Jos Verstappen set an aggregate time of 2'38.452.

The weather in Durban made a complete 180 degree turn from the past few days. Warm temperatures, bright sunshine and clear blue skies made for pleasant conditions and a dry track.

A1 Team Netherlands started the Saturday well with a second fastest time in the third and final free practice, the first that was run under dry conditions after the heavy rain of the past days.

During qualifying Verstappen went out right at the start of the four 15 minute sessions, as did most other drivers. This to avoid as much as possible the danger of having to abort a flying lap because of a red flag. Up to and including the third session there were no code reds. Only A1 Team Lebanon went into the wall, but the session did not have to be stopped. Only in the last session there were two code reds almost directly after each other, caused by spins of A1 Team USA and Austria.

A1 Team Netherlands driver Jos Verstappen was happy with the fourth grid position for the Sprint race tomorrow.

Jos Verstappen; "It's the best result of the season so far, of course I am happy with that result, It all went quite well and the car felt good, there is not much more I can say about it. Up to the last run it was quite close. We went out early in each session, because you never know what's going to happen with the red flags. If the red flag drops, you lose the entire session".

France will start the Sprintrace, that will begin with a rolling start at 13.30 local time, from pole. That rolling start will provide a spectacular sight and sound with 23 cars thundering down full throttle at the first hairpin corner, while the sound of the V8's resonates from the buildings along the circuit.

Britain

With Britain's best ever qualifying performance with a second place, Robbie Kerr is looking to capitalize in the races tomorrow and is aiming for that elusive win and to move up the table. France, on pole, is still looking strong but the times were close and Brazil who is ahead in the table by 11 points is back in eighth.

The weather changed from the very wet conditions of practice yesterday to glorious sunshine today. With morning practice interrupted by four red flags, A1Team.GBR didn't get in as many laps as it would have liked and so felt that a safe option on set-up was in order. Safe proved to be more than satisfactory as Robbie Kerr went out on used tyres for his first stint and set the tenth fastest time. On new tyres for sessions two and three he was the only driver other than Premat for France to set a time below one minute 19 seconds. He put in two tidy runs to put him second in the qualifying table. The fourth attempt which may have given the opportunity to pass the French for pole was aborted following three red flags from spins by the Austrian, American and Lebanese teams.