José María López leads Citroën quartet in first Saturday practice

Citroën Total WTCC dominated the first practice session on Saturday at the Spa-Francorchamps circuit, with José María López leading Yvan Muller, Ma Qing Hua and Sébastien Loeb in the 30 minute session.

The majority of the fast times came in the first few minutes, with López setting the benchmark time of 2:24.350, more than a second faster than team-mate and title rival Yvan Muller.

Throughout the rest of the session, it was all about track limits, with the majority of the field being given warnings for exceeding the track limits at the exit of Eau Rouge, with each of the three Lada drivers, James Thompson, Rob Huff and Mikhail Kozlovskiy, all having a lap time disallowed by the stewards.

Moscow race two winner Ma Qing Hua set his best time in the final moments of the session to go third fastest, but his time is also set to be disallowed by the stewards, which may see the final results of the session revised, but his time still stands on the current provisional results.

There were two yellow flag periods, both for incidents at Les Combes, with Campos Racing’s Dusan Borkovic spinning just after two-thirds of the session, and then with LADA Sport Lukoil’s Mikhail Kozlovskiy spinning and stopping in the last minute, which stopped any further improvements in times.

In the TC2T category, Franz Engstler was the fastest, albeit ten seconds off the pace of the TC1 class Citroën of José María López, while Norbert Nagy was able to get his first laps in with the TC2T class SEAT León of Campos Racing, but was over nine seconds slower than Engstler and nearly 20 seconds off the overall pace.

The next practice session is at 12:30 CET