Huff crosses the finish line ahead of Muller - Photo Credit: fiawtcc.com
Rob Huff took a bite out of Yvan Muller's World Touring Car Championship points lead with a lights-to-flag victory ahead of his teammate in the first race at the season finale in Macau.
The Chevrolet duo are now separated by 13 points, with Huff starting from third and Muller from eighth for Race 2.
The start of the race was aborted because all the cars were not lined up at the rolling start correctly. When they did get the go-ahead one lap later, Huff and Muller ran side-by-side down to Mandarin, where Rob pulled ahead and just kept out of the barrier on the exit.
The race came to an end for their teammate Alain Menu just behind though, as he and local ace Andre Couto both got too close to the wall. Couto swerved back out across the track, completing a 180o spin and returning across the track to hit Menu against the wall. Remarkably, nobody else got caught up in the accident. For Menu it was his second incident with Couto of the weekend, after the contact in qualifying that left him 13th on the grid.
With Menu's car stranded on the track the safety car came out. The race restarted at the end of the fourth lap, with Huff retaining his lead. Things would kick off again down at Lisboa, where Tiago Monteiro outbraked himself and went straight on. The two drivers he was trying to chase – Darryl O'Young and Mehdi Bennani – then got together on the exit, as O'Young pulled out to defend fourth place. O'Young ended up sideways in the barrier, and although the cars were quickly cleared the safety car needed to come back out for the track surface to be cleaned up.
Once the race got going again Muller would keep the pressure on Huff until the finish, but despite trying to find a way past at Lisboa on several occasions he could not get ahead.
Gabriele Tarquini finished a quiet third, with Tom Coronel fourth after benefiting from the O'Young-Bennani collision. Michel Nykjaer came out on top of the Yokohama Trophy battle in fifth overall, ahead of Franz Engstler. Seventh overall and third of the Trophy runners was enough for Kristian Poulsen to put himself out of reach in the points. Norbert Michelisz was eighth, with Bennani recovering to ninth ahead of Pepe Oriola.
