Kobayashi on pole in Bahrain GP2

After achieving a first pole position in Malaysia three weeks ago, Dam’s Jérôme d’Ambrosio posted another quickest laptime in today’s last qualifying session of the 08-09 GP2 Asia Series Championship.

However, following a black flag received in Sepang’s sprint race the Belgian will drop ten places on tomorrow’s feature race grid. It will be his teammate and Championship leader, Kamui Kobayashi, who will hence start on pole position, pocketing the two bonus points in the process and taking him even closer to the title.

Shanghai’s feature race winner Roldan Rodriguez and Sepang’s feature race winner Diego Nunes at Piquet confirmed their morning’s good form and will start tomorrow’s race respectively from second and third place.

ART’s Pastor Maldonado posted a laptime good enough to put him fifth quickest of the session with just five minutes left on the clock. But the man rounding up the Top 10 could have featured higher in the hierarchy had he had not been slightly blocked by Maldonado in his flying lap. Sadly for him, Qi-Meritus’ Alvaro Parente will have to be satisfied with a tenth best laptime for today. On the other hand, the experienced Venezuelan received a five position grid penalty.

At Arden’s, rookie Luiz Razia once again displayed a good pace, posting the sixth best laptime, ahead of another rookie Giedo van der Garde at GFH Team iSport. Davide Valsecchi may have lost the opportunity to keep the title fight alive past the feature race as he could only set the eighth best performance barely edging out Javier Villa.

Only two laps completed during this morning’s practice and a wrong choice of set up in this afternoon’s qualifying session will see title contender Vitaly Petrov start from 20th tomorrow. Kobayashi’s road to the GP2 Asia crown seems wide opened.

Tomorrow’s feature race will start at 15.50, local time.

Bahrain – Qualifying