The first round of the second half of the 2013 FIA World Touring Car Championship series, which had kicked off in March at Monza, Italy, was held on the temporary street track, Circuito da Boavista, built in the city of Porto, Portugal. The championship had visited the city three times in the past, every two years since 2007.

And this was one of three street track events this season, alongside with the Moroccan round and the season finale in Macau. Similar to the other two, the track in Porto is also exciting and challenging for the drivers, with virtually no escape zones.

The Portuguese races rounded out the European leg of the championship. The next stop will be the Argentine round, which filled the vacated slot after the cancelation of Brazilian event, and the championship would then head to U.S. and Japan which would be the opening round of the Asian leg.

On the race weekend, at Porto, there was a very important announcement for WTCC. As pretty much predicted, Citroen officially unveiled their plan to join the championship as a manufacturer team from 2014, the year that the new technical regulations will be introduced. The French marque, of course, is preparing their new WTCC cars in accordance with the new regulations and the nine times WRC (World Rally Championship) title winner, Sebastien Loeb, will drive one of the cars. So his new challenge should attract huge attention not only among the circuit race fans but among the rally fans. And, not surprisingly, a number of key figures from Citroen's motor sport division were seen at the track during the weekend.

Typically, the grid positions are even more important in the street track races because overtaking isn't easy on this kind of a track. The statistics for the championship races in the past shows that, as for the first races in which the reversed grids weren't applied, the winning rate of the pole sitter reached more than 72% on the street tracks, while it stayed somewhere around 64% on the permanent race circuits.

Still in the early stage of Q2 which was fought by the top 12 qualifiers from Q1, Yvan Muller clocked 2'05”347 and this remained as the fastest of all until the session ended. He was followed by his RML Chevrolet teammate, Tom Chilton, who set the time of 2'05” 545. Then the YOKOHAMA Trophy championship leader, Michel Nykjaer, came in there with 2'05”977 to round out the all Chevrolet top three. On top of this, James Nash in one of bamboo engineering run Cruzes finished the session in tenth, so the pole position of the reversed grids for Race 2 was also given to a Chevrolet driver...

The race day, Sunday, was favored by fine weather and the ambient temperature in the city of Porto already reached 30 degrees Celsius at 11 a.m. just before the start of Race 1, so many of the spectators in the temporary stand alongside the track were dressing lightly to enjoy the weather.

The formation lap began on time, with the two RML cars leading the field which was arrayed in pairs. As they came close to the start line, the red signals went off and they started to accelerate with their throttles wide open. Many thought the chance of the first corner accident was high but it didn't happen, except for physical contact between Norbert Michelisz in the Zengo Motorsport run Civic and Nykjaer and both of them were able to continue. However, the Hungarian Honda driver lost control of his car at Turn 13 on the next lap and ended up with hitting the concrete wall, resulting in premature retirement due to damage to his car's suspension.

The race was led by Muller, Chilton, Nykjaer and Gabriele Tarquini in a factory Honda Civic. But Pepe Oriola who had switched his car from SEAT to Chevrolet from this meeting caught them up and joined the group on Lap 3. Three laps later, Robert Huff followed the path of the Spaniard and it grew up to a six car leading pack!

On Lap 6, the Spanish teenager, Oriola, made a move on the 51 year old Tarquini but the Italian veteran skillfully fended off Oriola's attack. Two laps later, however, Tarquini's Civic began to generate white smoke. The amount of smoke rapidly increased and the Honda driver was forced to stop the car when he reached Turn 13.

The white smoke meant that there might be spilt oil from Tarquini's car on the track and that was the case. Fredy Barth almost spun his BMW on Lap 9 probably because of the oil and then a bizarre accident followed, as Franz Engstler collided with a marshal car that was on its way to help track clearing work! The German had also been involved in the infamous incident in the 2009 French round, when he had had a collision with an inadvertent Safety Car driver. But this time the damage to their cars wasn't so heavy in comparison with the incident three years ago, which was lucky for them.

Because of these accidents, the race director decided to send the Safety Car to control the situation. The race was extended to 12 laps, from originally planned 11 laps, but the racing resumed with only one lap to go and the leading cars crossed the finish line in the same order as they were on Lap 9. This meant Muller claimed his fifth victory of the season and Nykjaer, who also got on the overall podium by finishing third, won the YOKOHAMA Trophy class for three successive races.

After a longer than usual ? over four hours ? intermission, Race 2 got underway. As already mentioned, Nash sat on the pole position and he was followed by two SEAT drivers, Marc Basseng and Huff. The fourth grid was given to James Thompson in a Lada Granta.

It began with a standing start as usual. But this time the BMW drivers couldn't make most of the car's theoretical advantage at the start because the track width was narrow and the distance from the grids to the first corner was relatively short here in Porto.

Huff managed to pass his teammate Basseng at Turn 1 immediately after the start and moved up to second. Further back, Oriola who sat on the third row didn't made the best start, which allowed the RLM drivers to catch him. Chilton got ahead of the Spaniard for a moment but then Oriola hit back and forced the Briton to run wide. As a result, Chiton lost a lot of ground and dropped to tenth.

Starting from the pole position, Nash was comfortably increasing the gap with Huff in second. It was 2.708 seconds at the end of Lap 5 of the 11 lap race but grew to 4.855 seconds one lap later and 6.148 seconds at the end of Lap 8. Thus, no one could threaten Nash's lead position throughout the race and the YOKOHAMA Trophy contender scored his second overall win of the season, with a 5.624 second gap, since Race 2 of the Austrian round at Salzburgring.

The championship revisited the city of Porto after a year absence and the meeting was held under hot conditions with the air temperature reaching 30 degrees Celsius.

The track has relatively higher curbs on the corners and many drivers boldly drove over them to go round corners as fast as possible. Because of this, in terms of the amount of external load to the tires, Circuito da Boavista has been one of the toughest tracks that WTCC regularly visits. On top of this, the temperatures were high this year. So many expected the conditions during the races would be even tougher this year.

Because overtaking was extremely difficult on the confined street race track, the drivers sometimes were forced to make aggressive maneuvers or very hard braking during the races. But Yokohama Tire's racing tires for WTCC cars were completely reliable throughout the event and, needless to say, there was no tire breakage or any other problem at all.