Nurburgring WTCC: Lopez leads wet/dry final practice

With heavy rain overnight, the session started fully wet with the times almost a minute from Thursday’s dry pace, with Lopez’s first benchmark of 10m28.300s holding throughout much of the session.

The first casualty was Nordschleife expert Sabine Schmitz, who made contact with the barrier in her Munnich Motorsport Chevrolet and returned to the pits with damage and was unable to set any further laps in the session.

As the conditions began to dry out, improvements started in the latter part of the session, with first ROAL Motorsport’s Tom Coronel taking over the top of the time sheet.

But soon Tiago Monteiro became the first driver under the ten-minute mark in his Honda Civic with a time of 9m59.830s.

The Portuguese driver, whose championship challenge has been potentially dented following a late night decision to exclude Honda from the last two events by the FIA, was soon dropped by Lada’s Nicky Catsburg.

In the dying moments Monteiro's Honda teammate Norbert Michelisz too moved ahead, before Lopez jumped to the fore with a time of 9m41.561s.

Lada's Gabriele Tarquini and Hug Valante completed the top three ahead of Michelisz and Nicky Catsburg.

Honda’s Rob Huff had another difficult session after the Briton’s car had been repaired overnight by the team following a crash on Thursday in FP1.

But a mysterious lock-up at Turn 1 saw the 36-year-old crash out into the barriers and needed recovery, ending a lowly 14th among the WTCC drivers.

Lopez's teammate Yvan Muller finished sixth with the lead Sebastien Loeb Racing's Tom Chilton was seventh as Monteiro slotted in at eighth.

The top 10 was completed by Mehdi Bennani and Gregoire Demoustier, the former will once again be a part of Citroen's MAC3 line-up.

Volvo's Fredrick Ekblom failed to set a competitive time, will start from the back of the grid in the opening race, following an overnight engine change on his S60.

FP2 results:

Pos	Driver	Car	Time/Gap	Laps
1	Jose Maria Lopez	Citroen	9:41.561	3
2	Gabriele Tarquini	Lada	+2.723	4
3	Hugo Valente	Lada	+4.853	4
4	Norbert Michelisz	Honda	+5.267	3
5	Nicky Catsburg	Lada	+6.257	3
6	Yvan Muller	Citroen	+9.094	3
7	Tom Chilton	Citroen	+13.663	3
8	Tiago Monteiro	Honda	+18.269	3
9	Mehdi Bennani	Citroen	+20.068	3
10	Grégoire Demoustier	Citroen	+20.116	3
11	Tom Coronel	Chevrolet	+22.887	3
12	John Filippi	Chevrolet	+33.284	3
13	Ferenc Ficza	Honda	+34.600	3
14	Rob Huff	Honda	+47.487	2
15	Sabine Schmitz	Chevrolet	+5:10.962	1
16	Fredrik Ekblom	Volvo		3
17	Thed Björk	Volvo		3

Neil Hudson / TouringCarTimes