The stewards deemed no investigation was required for the lap eight incident in race two, which saw contact between Rob Huff, Gabriele Tarquini and Yvan Muller, with Tarquini retiring and Muller losing out to his team-mate and title rival Huff.
On lap eight, heading into the first corner, Yvan Muller passed Gabriele Tarquini into Turn 1 after an uncharacteristic error from the Italian, clipping the apex and bouncing over the kerbs and damaging the front-left of his Lukoil Racing Team SEAT León.
Immediately afterwards, Huff and Tarquini made additional contact, with Tarquini spun sideways, just clipping the tail of Yvan Muller’s Chevrolet which destabilised the car enough for Huff to get through, whilst Tarquini headed into retirement.
“I don’t know what happened because I don’t have the image of the accident between me and Huff, said Tarquini to TouringCarTimes. “I don’t know if he was already in, or if he braked too late and he touched me later on, the image from Eurosport you cannot tell because it joins (the accident) too late.”
“From inside the car, with the feeling I had it felt like Huff had hit me, but sometimes in the car you have a different point of view, you must see the real image.”
Huff’s perspective of the incident was that Tarquini’s car was already damaged and trying to turn in on the Chevrolet driver prematurely, racing with a car which already had a mechanical problem.
“I thought Gabriele was trying to get into the space between me and Yvan, but having looked at the video it looked like his car broke when he hit the kerb at Turn 1,” said Huff to TouringCarTimes.
“When we’ve gone through Turn 3, his car’s gone sideways and as he’s gone sideways he’s come across the front and slotted there. There was obviously a bit of contact between me and Gabriele, but that was much later, but I was on the inside with the overlap, his car was broken on the outside, I’m not really sure what could have been done about that.”
Yvan Muller, who was pressuring Tarquini admittedly into making a mistake so he could take fourth position, dropped behind Huff and Alberto Cerqui’s ROAL Motorsport BMW after his Chevrolet was tapped by the spinnin SEAT, but had very little to add about the incident:
“I just felt a push from the back and that cost me two places. I was just a victim.”
