Jackson caught out by damaged Shedden

Mat Jackson’s qualifying session ended after just one flying up after a misunderstanding with Honda’s Gordon Shedden, which saw Jackson caught in the gravel trap at the Craner Curves.

Jackson, the independents championship leader, was frustrated after qualifying, though the Motorbase Performance driver still made the top ten with seventh on the grid courtesy of his single flying lap of 1:11.309.

“To be honest, I’m quite surprised the car’s even here,” said Jackson to TouringCarTimes.

“We had a monumental moment down with Gordon, I don’t know what he was thinking, but if we’d have made contact the car would have been completely destroyed.”

Jackson had caught a slowing Shedden’s Honda Civic, who had tried to give way to the Ford going into the Craner Curves.

“When you’ve got a closing speed of about 50mph and you’ve got a split second to make a decision left or right, he should have made the decision way before he got to that point.”

“But that’s what it is, it’s ended our qualifying with one lap on the board, we’re just fortunate that one lap was okay enough to keep us in seventh place”

Shedden was apologetic about the incident, but stresses it was just an unfortunate incident, of which there were a few in today’s qualifying session.

“We had a steering problem which ended my qualifying session,” said Shedden.

“So I was going slowly going down Craners, and I saw him and moved to the right hand side on the approach, which is off the racing line to give him the perfect line, but he’d already committed to trying to pass me on the inside.”

“By that time I’d moved across and the closing speed’s obviously phenomenal, so it’s absolutely just one of those things, wrong place, wrong time.”

“I’ve been and spoken to Mat, and obviously the end result for him isn’t great, but it was meant for the best intentions of trying to get out of his way and give him his lap. I’ve been in this game long enough, I don’t play funny buggers in qualifying.”

Mat was philosophical still looking ahead to Sunday’s race, starting just ahead of the two Silverline Chevrolet Cruzes.

“We’re in good shape,” said Jackson.

“I think qualifying was full of events for other people as well, for the likes of Tom Boardman who’s proven to be pretty quick, so yeah, it’s going to be interesting”

“We’ve got to be consistent throughout the race and we need to pick up points, that’s the aim.”