HEAVYWEIGHT 1: Gordon Shedden
The big headlines are here, certainly ahead of the opening round, and the Fife flier did nothing to downplay the pre-season excitement by topping the pre-season test session at Silverstone recently.
Shedden was, for a decade, the benchmark in the BTCC in terms of outright pace. His three titles all came with Team Dynamics (2012, 2015 and 2016) before he was tempted away to the World
TCR stage for 2018. But now he is back and determined to get his winning mojo rolling again.
“I don’t think I am necessarily a better driver than when I left the BTCC – I don’t brake 10 metres later into a corner, for example,” he says. “But I am more complete in terms of the fact I know what factors I can control to help me improve my performance, and I focus on those.”
The Team Dynamics Honda FK8 is a new beast for Shedden. He did drive it twice in 2020 (when testing in place of an injured Matt Neal), but he is already relishing the engineering challenge that is ahead of him. The lessons learned by the pre-season running have shown the 42-year-old Shedden that there is more to come from the Japanese car.
The FK8 was a peaky car last season – where it was quick, it was very very quick, but the on-point handling meant that there were some venues where it was not in the game. Shedden knows that his job will be to fill in the troughs and capitalise on the highs for the Type R.
His engineering experience is strong and his pace is without question. Shedden is a high-class addition to the grid and expect his overtaking flair to be on show again. He will certainly be in with the chance of a fourth title.