Macau, FP2: López regains the leadership

For the first time so far during the Macau weekend, freshly crowned world champion José María López has topped the time sheet in one of the session.

In this morning’s second free practice the Argentine was the first and only driver to break the 2:27. mark and inflicted a gap of more than one second to the rest of the field.

The first incident during the session involved Henry Kowng’s SEAT that crashed head-on into the barrier at Lisboa bend. Minutes later Pepe Oriola’s Chevrolet hit the rail at Paiol, which prompted the red flag with twenty minutes left on the clock.

Just before the interruption López had set a provisional fastest lap of 2:26.965, beating Yvan Muller’s 2:27.811 by nearly nine tenths.

When the session resumed López improved further to 2:26.060, which was not to be beaten and left the others fighting for the second position.

Eventually Ma Qing Hua posted the second fastest lap (2:27.200); he was closely followed by the Honda duo of Gabriele Tarquini (2:27.245) and Tiago Monteiro (2:27.280), with Sébastien Loeb in fifth position (2:27.348).

Norbert Michelisz and Yvan Muller were classified sixth and seventh, ahead of Tom Chilton’s Chevrolet and Rob Huff’s LADA. Mehdi Bennani rounded off the top ten and Franz Engstler topped the TC2T class.

The qualifying session will kick off at 15.10. Because Macau is the longest circuit in WTCC calendar, qualifying will be longer than usual: Q1 and Q2 will last 30 and 15 minutes respectively (instead of 20 and 10), while Q3 will remain unchanged, with the fastest five drivers of Q2 allowed to a single timed lap.