Timo Scheider was pulling no punches after qualifying for the DTM event at Zandvoort, describing the session as nothing short of a 'catastrophe'.

While Oliver Jarvis took his maiden pole – the first for a driver using a year-old car – Audi's main drivers struggled during the Dutch qualifying session, with Martin Tomczyk the only person to make it past the second phase of qualifying.

Defending champion Scheider fared worst of the 2009 quartet in eleventh place and he admitted that qualifying had been a disaster.

"The word catastrophe describes my qualifying pretty accurately,” he said. “I can't tell exactly why it happened. I suppose a few nuances didn't fit together all the way. The whole grip level wasn't the way we're accustomed to it. Maybe this particular track surface, the temperature and the drizzle interacted unfavourably."

Tom Kristensen, who will start one place ahead of Scheider on the grid, also admitted that the session hadn't gone to plan although he conceded that Jarvis' run to pole was a plus point for the Audi brigade.

"This was not what we'd been wishing for,” he said. “We basically had a very fast car. We saw that in the morning. The tenths we were lacking to get into qualifying 3 can be explained by the fact that we were on the track at the wrong time. In the last sector we were short of a few tenths.

“You can either laugh or cry. I choose to laugh anyway because I'd like to congratulate Oliver Jarvis on a great lap that resulted in the pole position for Team Phoenix."