Practice report

Nurburgring WTCC: Lopez tops red-flagged first practice

Jose Maria Lopez was fastest in the second session of the day at the Nurburgring, with the Argentinian’s first run of 8m44.236s keeping him on top of the time sheets throughout the session.

The session was red flagged with two minutes to go following a crash of Honda’s Rob Huff. It was not as fiercely contested as the morning’s test, with the 60-minute free practice initially led by Tom Chilton.

This was before Lopez set his best time on his first flying run, which was five seconds off the pace shown by Yvan Muller earlier in the day.

Nicky Catsburg bounced back from an early puncture to become the first threat to Lopez, putting his Lada Vesta up to second place, but the Dutch driver was still 2.4s from the reigning champion’s time.

Chilton then found more time in his Citroen to close to within 1.3 seconds of Lopez, before Muller mounted a charge in the last ten minutes to take the spot from the leading privateer, just over a second behind his Argentinian teammate.

Honda’s Norbert Michelisz suffered with a throttle issue early on and came back to the pits, but the team were able to repair his car within the hour and get him back out where he’d end up going sixth fastest.

The Hungarian wasn’t the only one to suffer technical issues, with Fredrik Ekblom forced to return his Polestar Cyan Racing Volvo S60 to the pits with a broken cylinder.

There were further puncture related issues in the session, with Hugo Valente first slamming his Lada Vesta out just before 40 minutes were up, with his car was recovered under yellow flags.

While 2012 champion Huff suffered a more significant impact with the barrier just after Fuchsrohre with just three minutes remaining which was also seemingly puncture related.

With the Briton’s Honda Civic stranded on the entry into Adenauer Forst, the session was red flagged and not resumed, leaving Lopez on top of the time sheets.

FP1 results:

Pos	Driver	Car	Time/Gap	Laps
1	Jose Maria Lopez	Citroen	8:44.236	2
2	Yvan Muller	Citroen	+1.083	3
3	Tom Chilton	Citroen	+1.389	3
4	Nicky Catsburg	Lada	+2.410	3
5	Rob Huff	Honda	+2.749	2
6	Norbert Michelisz	Honda	+3.248	3
7	Gabriele Tarquini	Lada	+3.377	3
8	Tiago Monteiro	Honda	+4.812	2
9	Mehdi Bennani	Citroen	+5.307	3
10	Tom Coronel	Chevrolet	+6.291	5
11	Hugo Valente	Lada	+6.587	1
12	Thed Björk	Volvo	+9.150	3
13	Fredrik Ekblom	Volvo	+9.215	2
14	Sabine Schmitz	Chevrolet	+13.034	3
15	John Filippi	Chevrolet	+18.251	2
16	Ferenc Ficza	Honda	+24.347	3
17	Grégoire Demoustier	Citroen	+26.375	3