Team Abu Dhabi’s Alex Carella stormed to pole position for Sunday’s Grand Prix of Liuzhou, round four of the 2017 UIM F1 H2O World Championship, with a flying lap of 44.42 seconds in a nail-biting Q3 qualifying session.

The Italian was over half a second faster than four-time F2 World Champion Erik Stark and 0.37sec ahead of third-placed Ahmed Al-Hameli of Dubai’s Victory Team.

A relaxed Carella said, who now also jointly leads the UIM F1 Pole Position Championship with Stark, said:

A fourth pole for me in Luizhou.
It was really important for me to be in pole position.
I will not feel any pressure because this is not the first time I have been in this position, but we need to make a good choice for the set-up now in the warm-up for the race.
This seems to be my lucky place.
It’s important that we maintain everything for the race.

Norway’s Marit Stromoy qualified in fourth place, triple World Champion Philippe Chiappe settled into fifth and Team Sweden’s Jonas Andersson was sixth, although he faces a race against time to repair his boat for the race after engine issues forced him to miss the Q3 session.

A spectacular crash for two-time World Champion Sami Selio brought the second qualifying session to a premature conclusion and meant that both Thani and Rashed Al-Qemzi ran out of time to improve on their seventh and eighth positions for the starting line-up for Sunday’s race.