After the curtain raiser in Brazil in early March, the 2010 World Touring Car Championship had a two month leave which was longer than originally scheduled, because the Mexican round, the second event of the series, had been cancelled due to an aftermath of a flood.

The de facto second stop of the championship was the Moroccan round on a temporary street track in the city of Marrakech, which had been added to the calendar last year. Therefore, it was the second time for WTCC to set its feet on the African continent.

The WTCC rules require an additional test session on Friday for fly-away races or street track races. This naturally applied to the Moroccan round and it was a rookie driver named Norbert Michelisz who set the fastest lap time in the Friday's session. The Zengo-Denison Team's driver in a SEAT Leon TDI was surprisingly quick around the track and put his name on the top of time sheet again fairly and squarely in the first qualifying session against those strong opponents, after registering the second fastest time in the second free practice on Saturday.

However, he and Michel Nykjaer driving SUNRED Engineering's SEAT Leon TDI became the first "victims" of this street circuit in the second qualifying session which was fought by the top ten drivers from the first session. They both crashed their cars and Michelisz had to settle for the tenth grid as he hadn't set any time before his accident.

Meanwhile, the pole position was won by another SEAT driver, Gabriele Tarquini who was building on the momentum of a win in the season opening Brazilian round. The Italian was the only driver who got into the 1'45" bracket in the session.

Sunshine welcomed the Sunday's first race and the temperatures were 26/47℃ (air/ track surface) at the time of start. After the usual rolling start, Tarquini began to pull away and steadily built up a gap with Rob Huff in a Chevrolet Cruze in second. But the Briton was under pressure from Fredy Barth in one of SUNRED Engineering's SEAT Leon TDIs, as the latter rocketed from the eighth grid to the third position during the opening lap.

But Huff was skillful enough to fend off Barth's attack by masterly car control. Instead, Barth was forced to take one step backward to fourth because he was beaten by a teammate of Tarquini, Tiago Monteiro.

When the race had past its halfway point, as many expected many more battles to come, Andrei Romanov's BMW 320si crashed and halted on the track. The accident caused intervention of Safety Car but the work to retrieve the crashed car and clear up the track took some time and the race ended under the Safety Car run. As a result, Tarquini scored a pole-to-win which was his twelfth victory in WTCC. Following to him, Huff and Monteiro got on the podium.

As for the YOKOHAMA Independent Trophy, Franz Engstler in a BMW 320si won the class. Barth finished in fourth overall, after an impressive performance in the early stage.

On the Race 2's reversed grids for the top eight finishers of Race 1, Andy Priaulx in one of only two factory BMWs sat on the pole position, as a valuable reward for winning the hotly fought battle for eighth with Alain Menu's Chevrolet.

Race 2 began with the standing start format in which the rear wheel drive BMWs have certain advantage in theory. Sure enough, Priaulx made a good start but Michelisz's car was stationary on the second grid!

The following drivers narrowly steered clear of hitting the halted SEAT Leon but, in the process, Huff lost the control of his Chevrolet and smashed into the concrete wall on the pit straight. And a few driver started from the lower grids, Sergio Hernandez, the bamboo racing's teammates Harry Vaulkhard and Darryl O'Young, weren't lucky enough to escape from the aftermath of Huff's accident. Thus, there were four damaged cars left on the track.

The Safety Car was required to come out to handle the situation and it had to stay out as many as six laps. On Lap 6, the Safety Car turned off its yellow flashing lights and went to the pit lane. Now the field led by Priaulx came out of the final corner and resumed the race when they saw the green signal.

However, in less than a minute after the restart, another big accident took place. Fighting for fifth place, August Farfus and Menu was running side-by-side in Turn 4. Then the Brazilian driver who took the inside position locked up his front wheel under braking and hit the Swiss's Chevrolet on the outside.

Menu lost control of his car and ended up crashing into the concrete wall heavily. Fortunately, he was able to walk away unhurt from his badly damaged car which became the second wreck of the Chevrolet's three car factory team in this race. And now the race had to be controlled again by Safety Car.

But the track clearing work took long time again and Safety Car finally came in at the end of 12th lap, which caused a bizarre situation as only one lap left to the finish when the racing was resumed! On that final lap, Priaulx had a tense moment when he was on the verge of losing his car in Turn 7 but he managed to bring the car to the finish to score his first win of the season.

He was followed by Yvan Muller's sole surviving Chevrolet Cruze and Tom Coronel's SR-Sport run SEAT Leon TDI. This meant the podium of Race 2 was shared by the three manufacturers participating in this year's championship.

YOKOHAMA Independent Trophy class was won by a local ace Mehdi Bennani in the Wiechers-Sport's BMW 320si.