Yvan Muller wins race two in China to leave with 20pt lead

Reigning Champion Yvan Muller took a convincing victory in the second race in China, whilst Gabriele Tarquini gets involved in the Chevrolet championship battle, fighting Rob Huff off the track.

Rob Huff started from pole position, but it was Gabriele Tarquini who produced one of his usual super-fast starts to take the lead into the first corner, with Colin Turkington launching up from seventh to fourth at the first corner in the Wiechers-Sport BMW.

Also at the start, it was a disaster for Norbert Michelisz, the independent front-runner spun around in an incident involving Tiago Monteiro’s SUNRED, Javier Villas’s Proteam BMW and Alain Menu’s Chevrolet. Michelisz, Monteiro and Villa would take no further part in the race.

Huff quickly challenged back against Tarquini on the opening lap for the lead, but was forced off the track by the Italian, dropping him down to fourth place, whilst Yvan Muller moved into second. Huff immediately overtook Colin Turkington for third at the start of lap two, but was unable to make any further progress during the race, struggling for down-force with a lightly damaged car.

Two laps later, Muller snuck past the 49-year-old Italian for the lead and started to build a comfortable gap, as a gathering of cars formed up behind Tarquini’s SR León. Turkington locked up on lap 10, losing spots to Tom Coronel and Alain Menu, but eventually reclaimed them, re-passing Menu on lap 19 and Coronel on the final lap and took another win in the independents’ category.

Huff continued to harry Tarquini for second throughout the race, whilst fending off Turkington and then Coronel behind but to no avail, settling for third and losing ten points to Muller in the title battle.

Charles Ng picked up a Championship point with 10th as the SUNREDs struggled for performance during the race. With the exception of Tarquini managing to hold off Huff in second, a poor start for Oriola saw the Spaniard finish 13th and Barth slowly slid down the order after starting third to finish in 12th place.

Kristian Poulsen finished seventh overall and second in the independents’ category. With Nykjaer down in eighth of the independents and Villa and Michelisz not scoring, the Dane builds up a 23 point lead over Michelisz in the independents’ trophy with just 43 points available at the season finale at Macau.

Fabio Fabiani took his second win of the day in the two-car Jay-Ten category, and secures the title for normally aspirated cars on his last scheduled appearance this season.

Alain Menu is now mathematically out of the Championship, with Muller now leading Huff by 20 points after going to China with a 13 point lead, with 50 points available at Macau.