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Alain Menu leads Chevrolet podium sweep in race one in Porto

Alain Menu claimed his third victory of the season with a lights-to-flag effort in today's opening World Touring Car Championship race in Porto, while team-mates Yvan Muller and Rob Huff followed him across the line for another Chevrolet 1-2-3

Menu controlled the field right from the start and never looked under threat. A race-long battle between Muller and Huff for second gave Menu the freedom to pull away at the rate of a couple of tenths per lap, and once he had build a comfortable buffer he simply maintained his advantage. The eventual winning margin was 1.2 seconds.

Like most of the scraps during the race, the battle between Menu and Huff promised much but amounted to little. Whatever slight pace advantage Huff might have had was insufficient for him to mount a challenge, meaning that his hopes of claiming second rested on Muller making a mistake that never came.

The one significant passing move came from local favourite Tiago Monteiro, who managed to get around SUNRED SEAT team-mate Gabriele Tarquini for fourth on the opening lap, and then survived a couple of attempts from the Italian to reclaim the position.

Eighth-placed Norbert Michelisz (Zengo Dension BMW) was first of the Independents; the Hungarian spending much of the race trying unsuccessfully to pass Robert Dahlgren's Volvo.

SUNRED pair Alexsei Dudukalo and Fredy Barth were early casualties of an incident at the first chicane, and the same corner later accounted for former GP2 racer Javier Villa's Proteam BMW.

Results - 11 laps:

Pos  Driver              Team/Car            Time/Gap
 1.  Alain Menu          Chevrolet         23m22.763s
 2.  Yvan Muller         Chevrolet           + 1.262s
 3.  Rob Huff            Chevrolet           + 1.519s
 4.  Tiago Monteiro      SUNRED SEAT         + 5.710s
 5.  Gabriele Tarquini   SUNRED SEAT        + 10.457s
 6.  Tom Coronel         ROAL BMW           + 12.237s
 7.  Robert Dahlgren     Polestar Volvo     + 16.693s
 8.  Norbert Michelisz   Zengo BMW          + 17.256s
 9.  Michel Nykjaer      SUNRED SEAT        + 17.724s
10.  Stefano D'Aste      Proteam BMW        + 18.232s
11.  Kristian Poulsen    Engstler BMW       + 18.801s
12.  Franz Engstler      Engstler BMW       + 20.360s
13.  Darryl O'Young      Chevrolet          + 25.778s
14.  Mehdi Bennani       Proteam BMW        + 26.084s
15.  Pepe Oriola         SUNRED SEAT        + 27.343s
16.  Yukinori Taniguchi  Bamboo Chevrolet   + 55.046s

Retirements:

     Javier Villa        Proteam BMW           6 laps
     Fredy Barth         SUNRED SEAT           3 laps
     Aleksei Dudukalo    SUNRED SEAT           0 laps

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