After the qualifying incident at Monza, Lukoil Lada Sport replaced Aleksei Dudukalo with series rookie Mikhail Kozlovskiy.

[3] Muller led the dry first free practice session on Saturday morning with teammate Tom Chilton third, the pair separated by the Honda of Gabriele Tarquini who had set the pace earlier on.

[4] Muller led an RML 1–2 in the second practice session with Alex MacDowall making it three Chevrolets at the top of the times.

[6] Tarquini took the first pole position for the Castrol Honda World Touring Car Team ahead of the bamboo-engineering Chevrolet of Nash.

The first part of qualifying was led by Tarquini, whose teammate Tiago Monteiro brought out the red flags halfway through the session when he hit one of the walls at the second chicane.

Tarquini spent most of Q2 at the top of timing pages, Chilton looked set to take pole position when he came across the slow moving Campos Racing car of Fernando Monje who had just left the pits.

The ALL-INKL.COM Münnich Motorsport cars of Huff and Marc Basseng were on row four, Pepe Oriola was ninth and Monje in tenth would start on pole position for race two.

The second stoppage brought warm–up to an early end when Boardman appeared to suffer a brake failure, clipping the front of MacDowall's Chevrolet and colliding head–on with the barriers at the final chicane.

The race resumed with two laps to go, the main battle was for the final podium spot with Muller chasing Nash.