Gordon Shedden enjoyed his return to the Dunlop MSA British Touring Car Championhip podium after a “thoughtful” battle with Colin Turkington at Snetterton.
Starting from pole position, the Halfords Yuasa Racing Honda Civic Type-R defied the attacks of his Subaru Levorg rival for seven of the 12 laps in Norfolk, Turkington finding his way by exiting the Agostinis hairpin.
Second place was enough to see Shedden rise from ninth to fourth in the Drivers’ Championship, 42 points adrift of series leader, Sam Tordoff, who finished seventh.
“First time in six races that I’ve been on the podium, which is nice”, Shedden told The Checkered Flag afterwards. “It was a good race with Colin and nice to get some big points on the table.”
On his defensive drive, Shedden added: “There was a big difference in the cars and he used the strengths of his well to find a way past.
“I had to slow the car down to stop the advantage of the Subaru coming out of the corners. They’ve got mega traction coming out of the slow corners, so you’ve got to leave nothing.
“That means going slow; in a funny way, if Colin was about half a second back then we could have gone and got a bit of a gap. A thoughtful race – a little bit of cat and mouse!”
Both drivers opted for the softer Dunlop tyre compound in the opening race, Shedden indicating that the additional penalty ballast for race two could make it tougher for both this afternoon.
He added: “On the soft tyres, we kept the Ford behind us and looked after them pretty well. There’s a lot of positives from it, but now we’ve got to improve it for the next race.
“We really want to try and keep scoring. Getting to the end puts a smile on your face. Obviously we’ve got a lot of weight on now for race two, but Colin will have a fair amount more than in that race so we’ve got to go around scoring points.”
