Honda’s Gordon Shedden says that he and fellow front row man Colin Turkington might ‘be like mobile chicanes’ in the first British Touring Car Championship race at Snetterton, despite smashing the qualifying lap record.
Shedden believes that the lack of straight-line speed in his Honda might hamper him on raceday, with the Scot being just 27th in the speed trap at the end of the Bentley Straight in qualifying.
“I’m sure he [Colin] will get a good start,” said Shedden to TouringCars.Net. “I don’t think we were the quickest through the speed traps either, so you might find that me and Colin are like mobile chicanes in the first race.
“You’ll probably have Adam Morgan drive around the outside of us both down the back straight on the first lap!”
Despite the issues with straight-line speed, Shedden benefitted from carrying little success ballast in qualifying to take his first BTCC pole since Donington Park in 2013.
“I think that was probably the last pole for Honda too, so it goes to show that we’ve been carrying quite a lot of ballast, which makes pole positions not very easy to come by.
“It’s by far and away the quickest I’ve ever been around here; it’s quicker than the lap record and we didn’t get anywhere near that either last year. It was a really, really good step [forward], it was a cracking lap, it all came together.
“Was there much more left in the tank? Possibly yeah there was a little bit, but thank goodness I didn’t need it in the end.”
The former champion hopes to be able to score big on Sunday to make up for his poor fortune in all of the previous three meetings, where four non-scores have dented his championship chances.
“We need to try and score heavily tomorrow. I’ve always said you need the cards to fall your way – there’s a lot of things which have happened this year which I couldn’t change.
“There was a load of stuff happened at Thruxton which took me out of two podium places, there was the puncture while cruising around in second place at Oulton, so we’ve probably chucked 60 points away quite easily. Then at Croft it just didn’t work at all.
“We’re four and a half miles an hour slower through every speed trap than the fastest car, so I’ve got a tough day tomorrow, but you never know – a little bit of experience and cunning and we’ll see what happens!”