Mirroring the top ten, meanwhile, the fight for places was just as fierce in the main field, with Christian Montanari - the winner in Monaco - moving past Daniel la Rosa to take twelfth place, and the recovering van Lagen getting the better of Milos Pavlovic. Indian driver Karun Chandhok was also finding a fine performance, managing to overtake Celso Miguez and then Ryo Fukuda to move up the order. Raffaele Giammaria continued to make progress on his World Series learning curve, but the Italian’s race came to a premature end on lap eight after he ran out of road and beached his DAMS entry in the gravel trap.
On lap 14 of 19, the race lost another two drivers, as Tomas Kostka and Giorgio Mondini both retired and, while the top five remained largely unchanged to the chequered flag, Gommendy also made an error that allowed fellow Frenchman Pilet to move past him into sixth.
Out front, however, Porteiro was able to give the Spanish crowd the home victory they had been cheering for, leading Kubica across the line by a comfortable - in the overall scheme of things, anyway - 1.1secs.
“It’s very special to get my first race win of the season at home," the Spaniard admitted, "The most important thing here was to get the pole for the sprint race and, when I saw that Salignon had stalled, I thought that that would make things easier. After that, it was a good race, even though I had a lot of oversteer at the end.”
Kubica's second place was good for his championship challenge, the points leader extending his advantage at the top of the table.
“This is a good result for the championship and an excellent result for the team," the Pole conceded, "The car was understeering a lot of the time and that affected the performance. We now need to confirm our good form in the second race, where race tactics will be extremely important.”
