Gordon Shedden has vowed to maintain his defence of the British Touring Car Championship title until the season finale, despite strong competition from Sam Tordoff and Matt Neal.
Shedden, who claimed a race victory amid the triple-header at Rockingham Motor Speedway last weekend [27th-28th August] narrowed the advantage of Tordoff at the top of the standings to twenty points, and now sits within a race victory’s worth of markers of the top spot. The recovery came after an underwhelming home round at Knockhill for the Scot.
Shedden managed to claim his second pole position of the season on Saturday amid torrentially wet conditions, poor visibility and strong winds, before converting the top spot into his third victory of the campaign.
A switch to the harder compound Dunlop rubber and the addition of 75 kilograms of success ballast to his Honda Civic Type-R saw the double series winner fall to tenth in the second contest, before a feisty drive to second ahead of a racy Colin Turkington in the final encounter as Aron Smith impressively took the spoils.
Reflecting on his work at the first of two visits to Northamptonshire for the series this year, Shedden was elated to have closed on the championship lead, and admitted it was a tough juggling act in the final race to maintain the runner-up spot.
“I’m dead chuffed with the weekend.” admitted Shedden.
“I broke the slipstream to the guys behind in race one and then focussed on keeping everything nice and smooth. In race two, I was on a bit of a hiding to nothing on the hard tyres with maximum ballast, and I really had to get my elbows out at the end because I wasn’t going very fast at all by then!”
“It would have been nice to win race three, but Árón drove really well and didn’t make any real mistakes and it would have required a fairly monumental lunge to try to get past,”
“Then when Colin caught up during the final safety car period, I had to keep one eye in my mirrors too because he clearly had some good pace.”
Looking ahead to the final six races of the season, starting at Silverstone in three weeks time, Shedden was pragmatic about his gains on Tordoff at the top, and vowed to keep pushing as hard as possible to make a third crown a reality.
“Still, points make prizes as they say and we’ve closed back up to the top of the championship table. We will keep working hard and fighting to the very end.”