Looking back at the previous four races of the 2007 FIA World Touring Car Championship (WTCC) so far, the first and second races were won by BMW and the third by Chevrolet and fourth by SEAT.
Now the spotlight centered on Alfa Romeo and how they would perform in the fifth and sixth races of the season held at Valencia, Spain.

As the weight handicap system is employed by the WTCC, Alfa Romeo's had no extra weights and made the most of it in this event.

It was James Thompson in an Alfa Romeo 156 who marked the fastest time in the qualifying session on Saturday.
His time was 1'43"954 and Yvan Muller in SEAT Leon followed only 0.001 of a second behind. Then, following Andy Priaulx's BMW in third place, Jordi Gene and Michel Jourdain from the SEAT camp came fourth and fifth, which showed that Alfa Romeo and SEAT had certain advantages.

Race 1 on Sunday (the fifth race of the season) turned out to be a rough one with a number of clashes and withdrawals in the early part of the race.
Starting from the pole position, however, Thompson drove through the 15-lap race without any trouble and scored a splendid pole-to-finsh win.
It was his first win with Alfa Romeo since his transfer from the SEAT camp last year and the second one in WTCC after he won the season opener of 2005 (the inaugural year of the championship) at Monza.

With a five hour interval after the start of Race 1, the top eight finishers of the previous race sat on their respective grids for Race 2 (according to the reverse grid system).
This meant that Jorg Muller in BMW sat on the pole position and Luca Rangoni (BMW) followed. Thompson was to start from eighth on the grid.

The Briton was the quickest on the track again.
He passed two cars on the opening lap and pushed hard to pursue his rivals in front of him.
After overtaking Gene's SEAT at the first corner on lap 3, he also passed Yvan Muller on the last corner of the same lap, which put him in the fourth position.

In the ensuing laps, he never eased off and passed Rangoni's BMW in Turn 1 of lap 6.
The maneuver put him into third and he also overtook Andy Priaulx on lap 7, and then finally passed the race leader, Jorg Muller, on lap 8, which meant that Thompson assumed the lead position to repeat his feat in Race 1.

Eventually, he finished the 13-lap race in the top slot and scored a double win.
It was only the second time in the history of WTCC for a driver to win both races in one event, following the same achievement by Yvan Muller in the second round of 2005.

Born in England, on 29th April, 1974.

He scored two wins in the 1992 British Formula Vauxhall series and finished the season in fourth. In the next year, he drove a Honda Civic in the British Saloon Cup series and won the championship title with seven wins.
Then he stepped up to the British Touring Car Championship (BTCC) and took the crown of the privateer division in his first season, which made his name notable.
Afterwards, he drove for Vauxhall in the '95 and '96 seasons and then for Honda from '97 to '00 season in the BTCC before he returned to the Vauxhall camp for the '01 season. After winning two championship titles in '02 and '04 for Vauxhall, he moved to Alfa Romeo in '05, then to SEAT in '06, but came back to the Italian marque for the '07 season.

Born in France, 15th August, 1969.

He won two races in the 1988 French Formula Renault series and ranked third in the standings. In 1989, he was promoted to the French Formula Three, where he finished the season in third.
In 1992, the Frenchman took his first title in the British F2 Championship. Then he competed in the 1993 FIA F3000 Championship in which his best result was fifth.
He turned to tin-tops in '94 and participated in the French Touring Car Championship with BMW, and took the title the next year, which kick-started his new career.
After establishing some track records in the touring car races in Italy and Germany, he moved to the British Touring Car Championship (BTCC) in '98. He drove for the Audi team in his first year before jumping ship to Vauxhall and took the title in the '03 season for the British marque.
He has driven in the WTCC since '06 and scored his first win in the series in the fifth round of that year.

Valencia Circuit (Spain)

The Valencia Circuit is located 20km away from Valencia which is the third largest city in Spain. It is well known that the famous GP rider Jorge Martinez had a hand in designing the course. Thanks to the warm weather of the area, the track is frequently used as the venue for winter testing by various racing teams including those of Formula One.
The length of the track is 4,005m and the layout consists of several low speed corners. As the whole site is relatively flat, spectators can overlook a large part of the circuit, thus it is easy for them to grasp what is going on during a race. And it is an counter-clockwise circuit which is very rare for a race track on a worldwide basis.