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Successful first weekend for Gordon Shedden in WTCR

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Gordon Shedden had a successful first race weekend in the World Touring Car Cup, scoring points in his first race with Team WRT at the Circuit Moulay El Hassan.

Shedden qualified eighth for the first race of the weekend, losing the opportunity to improve after lightly clipping the wall in his Audi RS 3 LMS, but would go on to finish fifth in the first race.

In Race 2, he finished 11th where he qualfied, finding it difficult to pass at the tight street circuit, while brake issues in the final race on Sunday meant he’d retire from the race.

“I think the weekend was more positive than the results showed,” said Shedden to TouriI was comfortable yesterday in fifth, running around there and the pace was great and where the car should have been. On true pace, it wasn’t a top four car, but we should have been in that mix. We missed out just a little bit on the reversed grid, which means it was always going to be difficult.

“It’d been a totally different day if we’d just found a quarter of a tenth in Q2, as the car was quite fast. In the first race I was just stuck in a queue, nowhere to go, and then in Race 3, we just had brake problems all the way through, it was very strange.”

Explaining why the Audis seem to have run into more brake issues than other marques, with the Comtoyou Racing Audis also experiencing heavy damage, Shedden surmised:

“It’s just we’re the heaviest car. Last year in TC1, they all had brake problems. And now the cars are now 200kg heavier, so how were we never going to have brake problems? And our car’s even heavier than everyone else’s. We’ve just got to manage that.

“JK (Vernay) got a great win off the reversed grid so that proves there’s good pace in it and we’ve got to keep chipping away at that to try and take those big points when we can.”