A horror pit stop took the gloss off a promising start for New Zealand at the A1 Grand Prix world cup season opener in the Netherlands overnight.
Under grey skies at Zandvoort and with light rain that made track conditions unpredictable, Kiwi driver Matt Halliday drove Black Beauty to 6th place in the sprint race to earn one championship point.
But a disastrous pit stop when a jammed wheel nut meant the left rear wheel refused to budge cost the team dearly a third of the way through the feature race.
The car dropped well down the field before Halliday fought back to finish 11th -- just one place out of the points.
Only eight nations won races in the inaugural season of A1 Grand Prix, but there were two new winners today as South Africa cleared out from Mexico and France in the Sprint Race and Germany edged out the USA and Australia in the feature.
Germany has set the early pace on the championship table with 13 points from the weekend, followed by Mexico on 11 points and the USA on 8.
The drama for New Zealand happened during the switch to wet weather tyres to cope with increasing rain.
The pit lane hold up dropped Halliday, who had started 6th on the grid, well down the field after establishing a top 4 spot. A spin into a trackside runoff area didn't help either.
New Zealand, with one point, is 12th-equal among the 23 nations.
New Zealand's engineering team director David Sears said Halliday did a good job coming to grips with the track in the limited time he had to practice.
"But the pit stop problem didn't help the cause and left us battling up-hill," Sears said. "It was all the more galling because we'd been so slick in our pit stop practices the entire weekend.
Halliday was philosophical about the extended pit stop.
"These things happen from time to time. That's simply motor racing. I'm positive the guys will work on it and make sure it doesn't happen again," he said.
Halliday made a good start in the opening Sprint Race. New Zealand had qualified 10th, but moved up a spot when Switzerland was demoted because of a technical infringement in qualifying.
Halliday went from 9th to 7th by the first corner, passing the Netherlands and Canada, and quickly reeled in the United States to move up to 6th.
South Africa, with 19-year-old rookie Adrian Zaugg driving, became the 9th nation to win an A1 Grand Prix race with its first-ever win, a feat repeated by another rookie, German teenager Nico Hulkenberg, in the feature.
Jonny Reid will drive Black Beauty at next weekend's second round at Brno in the Czech Republic while Halliday competes at Bathurst.
- NZPA
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