Leaving the European rounds behind, the 2013 FIA World Touring Car Championship made a long trip to the South American continent to run the inaugural Argentine round at Autodromo Termas de Rio Hondo about 1000km north-west of the country's capital, Buenos Aires.

The race track had began operating in 2008 but had an extensive rework on the facilities recently. The surface conditions are very well maintained and it has plenty of track width throughout, so it can certainly be referred as one of the best international circuits in South America. But the renovation project seems to be delayed significantly, as the spectators' stands and even the garages were still uncompleted when the teams arrived at the track. Therefore, the event had to run with the temporary stands and large tent-like structures that were provided for the teams as “pit garages.”

As this was one of the fly-away events, the weekend started with a 30 minutes testing session on Friday. The session was important for the teams because they had to check if the cars would work properly after the long overseas transportation to Argentina, and of course most of the drivers had to first of all learn the track.

There were two 30 minute free practice sessions on Saturday morning. After dominating Friday's session, Yvan Muller in one of RML run Chevrolet Cruzes was the fastest in the first practice once again, followed by his teammate Tom Chilton in second. For the second practice, they remained in the top two of the time sheet but swapped the positions between them.

The trend didn't change in the qualifying session. While Chilton had to settle for sixth in Q1, in the subsequent Q2 section by the top 12 survivors of the first section, Muller set the time of 1'47”920 which was the fastest of all, as no other driver could clock a time less than 108 seconds, and his British teammate followed in second with a gap of 0.503 seconds.

The speed of Honda drivers was also remarkable. Driving the Civic prepared by Zengo Motorsport, Norbert Michelisz secured the third grid for Race 1 and the pair in the Honda factory cars run by the JAS team, Gabriele Tarquini and Tiago Monteiro, took the fourth and seventh grids respectively. The local touring car ace Jose Maria Lopez in the Wiechers-Sport run BMW 320 TC was tenth fastest in Q2, which meant the Argentine was starting Race 2 from the pole position in his maiden WTCC outing.

The weather was favorable throughout the weekend. As it was winter season in the South American countries, the air temperatures on Sunday morning when the teams had the warm up session was as low as 10 degrees Celsius but it came up to 23 when Race 1, the first ever WTCC race in Argentine, was about to start, with the surface temperature at 40.

After an extra rolling lap, the first race of the day got under way. As soon as the red signals went off, the pole sitting Muller got better acceleration than anybody else and entered the first corner as the race leader. Behind him, Michelisz passed Chilton to move up to second. Then Tarquini and Pepe Oriola, now driving a Chevrolet Cruze instead of SEAT Leon, also got ahead of the Briton but, soon after that, the Italian veteran ran wide and dropped down to seventh.

Whereas Muller immediately started to pull away, the fight for second became fiercer. Oriola was pushing Michelisz hard from behind but the Spaniard was also under heavy pressure from Chilton who was making up the lost ground at the start. On Lap 3, Oriola got abreast of Michelisz on the back straight but it wasn't enough for him to overtake the Honda driver. Worse still, this move by Oriola gave Chilton an opportunity to attack on him at Turn 7 and the Briton didn't overlook it.

After this position change, the two Chevrolet drivers continued to chase Michelisz. On the next lap, Chilton made a move on the Hungarian on the back straight but it just ended up with a side-by-side run. However, Michelisz's small mistake at the final corner allowed not only Chilton but Oriola as well to pass him, so the Honda driver fell back to fourth.

On the other hand, the race leading Muller was running in solitude and eventually no one could threaten his position until the checkered flag fell. This was the Frenchman's sixth victory of the season. As Oriola passed Chilton on Lap 7, the Spaniard finished in second to stop the RML team's one-two but the three podium places were swept by the Chevrolet drivers anyway.

After starting from the tenth grid, the local boy Lopez won the YOKOHAMA Trophy class in his first WTCC appearance by finishing fifth overall.

With the Argentine sitting on the pole position, and the YOKOHAMA Trophy championship leader,
Michel Nykjaer, alongside him, Race 2 began at 4:20 p.m., two hours later from the start of Race 1.

At the standing start on the slightly dusty track, Lopez driving a BMW, which had a theoretical advantage in the acceleration from a stationary condition because of its rear wheel drive layout, made a better getaway than Nykjaer. Behind them, Monteiro made a very good start from the fourth grid and squeezed his Civic into the space between the two front row starters. The Honda driver managed to pass Nykjaer before they reached Turn 1.

On the second lap, big players got closer to the leading pack of the race. Muller started from the tenth grid but he was already running in fifth on this lap. Tarquini also gained several positions during the opening lap and he then tried to overtake Nykjaer from the outside. Actually the Honda driver almost got ahead of the Hungarian but he was unintentionally blocked by his teammate, Monteiro who was just in front of Nykjaer, so Tarquini had no choice but going off the track to avoid hitting the teammate!

As a result, Muller and James Nash moved up further and were now in third and fourth. However, Nash and the pursuing Nykjaer made contact on Lap 3 and this allowed Tarquini to pass both of them in a move. Now the Italian was running in fourth, still amid the hotly fought battle for the podium.

As the race entered its middle phase, Lopez was leading without a hitch and comfortably stayed away from pursuing Monteiro. The Portuguese rather had to care for his own position because Muller started to put a lot of pressure on him and an incident between them happened on Lap 5.

Turn 5, at the end of the back straight, was the most important overtaking point in this circuit and the slip streaming on the straightaway was the key to a successful overtaking on the approach to the corner. But, on this occasion, Muller got too close to Monteiro under the braking for the corner and hit him from behind. The Portuguese driver's Civic spun on the spot and Muller moved up to second but the Frenchman was given a drive through penalty for the collision, so his hope for another victory of the day was gone.

Now that Monteiro and Muller were out of contention, Lopez's closest opponent was Tarquini who was about 4.5 seconds behind him. And the local touring car ace had a lot of experience and the full knowledge on the track. Thus, in front of his home crowd cheering for him, Lopez claimed the historic home win in the inaugural Argentine round of the championship, which created an emotional air in the circuit.

The championship visited Autodromo Termas de Rio Hondo for the first time in its history. While some of the recent renovation works were unfinished and, for example, the teams had to use large tents as their pit garages, the drivers seemed to have favorable impressions on the race track itself.

The track doesn't have a lot of undulations but the grip level of the surfaces are relatively low, as the asphalt aren't much aged yet since the resurfacing work. Therefore, the tires tend to slide a lot and actually the tire temperatures were little on the high side but, overall, the track doesn't put high severity on the tires. On Sunday, there were a lot of hard battles for the positions not only in the leading pack but also in the entire field in two races. But the ADVAN racing tires never had a problem and responded well to the drivers' confidence throughout the race meeting.

As the circuit is located in the desert area, fine sand are constantly blown in by the wind. On top of this, aggressive driving of the WTCC drivers tended to bring the dirt onto the track, so the surfaces were always a little dirty throughout the weekend.