The Dunlop MSA British Touring Car Championship heads north to Oulton Park this weekend and second-placed Gordon Shedden is looking to close the gap to championship leader Tom Ingram, but he concedes that it’s likely to be a challenging weekend.
“Oulton Park is great fun to drive, but I’m fully expecting a tough weekend – probably one of our toughest, in fact.” said Shedden.
“It has traditionally been a rear wheel-drive circuit because they can pull away from the hairpins quicker, but Honda cars have generally been competitive there too, we’ve scored some good results over the years and the Civic Type R is a very well-balanced piece of kit.”
The tight and twisty nature of the Chesire circuit puts the empahsis on qualifying, so the Halfords Yuasa Racing driver will be giving his all on Saturday.
“Being so difficult to pass at Oulton, qualifying could be make-or-break so I’ll really need to dig deep to pull something special out of the bag, particularly with 66kg of ballast on-board and the stop-start nature of the lap.
“The aim will be to make it as far up the grid as I can, although if I don’t manage to crack the top ten – which is a real possibility – then it will come down to playing the long game. The bottom line is that we’re in a better position in the championship than we were this time last year, and without the exclusion at Donington we would be in the lead.
“Whilst it’s obviously disappointing not to be, we tend to get stronger over the second half of the season as we get to tracks that suit us a bit more, so there’s every reason to be optimistic right now.”
