Yvan Muller leads RML 1-2 in Porto qualifying

Yvan Muller has taken his fourth consecutive pole position and his fifth of the season at a hot and sunny Porto for RML, leading team-mate Tom Chilton in qualifying at the Portuguese street circuit.

The three-time champion set a time of of 2:05.347 in the second part of qualifying on his first flying lap before the session was red flagged after the Tuenti Racing Chevrolet of Pepe Oriola hit the wall at Turn 2 and stopped on circuit.

When the session resumed, Muller’s RML team-mate Tom Chilton was able to improve his time to secure an RML 1-2, with Chevrolets occupying the top three positions thanks to Nika Racing’s Michel Nykjaer in third, who was the top placed Yokohama Trophy driver.

Norbert Michelisz was the top qualifying Honda in fourth for Zengõ Motorsport, whilst James Thompson scored Lada’s best qualifying result with fifth in the Granta Sport, just ahead of Gabriele Tarquini’s Honda.

Rob Huff was the quickest of the SEAT’s in seventh, just three-thousandths of a second faster than his Münnich Motorsport team-mate Marc Basseng, whilst bamboo-engineering’s James Nash and ROAL Motorsport’s Tom Coronel will complete row five for race one and take the front row for the reversed grid race two.

Oriola’s accident saw the Spaniard slip to 12th where he will start both of tomorrow’s races.

Other names missing out in Q1 included local driver Tiago Monteiro. The Honda driver was still suffering with a technical problem after a turbo issue in FP2 and was unable to set a time better than 17th with the limited running in the session, whilst Alex MacDowall had a single-car accident on circuit and took damage to the front of his bamboo Chevrolet and was unable to take part in the rest of the session.

Lada’s Mikhail Koslovskiy also missed the session due to damage sustained after a crash in FP2.

The first race of the day on Sunday is scheduled for 11:20 WET.