Jack Goff ended his first British Touring Car Championship season on a high note with a podium finish in the final race of the 2013 season, after a race-long duel with the Honda of Gordon Shedden.
The Team HARD driver had by far the best weekend of his maiden season in BTCC, a sixth place finish in race two followed by a first rostrum visit in the final race at the sodden Kent venue.
The result also confirmed a change in fortune for the former Renault UK Clio Cup champion, after a season of ups and downs that ended on a big high for Goff and Tony Gilham’s HARD squad.
“It’s been great”, a delighted Goff told TheCheckeredFlag.co.uk afterwards. “The car has been good and it’s improved in every race, and to come away with our best result of the season in the second race and then better it again in the last race of the year is a fantastic result for me and the team.
“We’ve had no luck all year, some absolutely dreadful luck, so to finally have a weekend without something going wrong was nice because it allowed us to concentrate on doing what we needed to do.”
Goff came just 2.1s from the top step of the podium in the tense final race of the season, going wheel-to-wheel with outgoing champion Shedden in a feisty scrap for the victory.
The Vauxhall driver settled for his first podium finish of the season in the end, opting out of the fight towards the end of the race to seal a long-awaited first visit to a BTCC podium.
On the race three battle, Goff said: “The first seven or eight laps of the race we were quicker than Gordon. He was defending in all the places he needed to defend and putting me on the grass here and there.
“Then I realised ‘do I really want to get this first podium or do I want to go for the win’, and our car went off slightly towards the end of the race so I backed off a little bit. It’s good to get second, it’s good for our sponsors and it’s obviously good for me”
Goff intends to continue in the championship next season, adding: “That’s the plan. We’re working really hard to get a budget together, and fingers crossed we’ll be on the grid with some testing next year.”
