Gordon Shedden: “He hit me with a tyre stack!”

Gordon Shedden was elated to score his first World Touring Car Cup in a dramatic second race of the weekend at the Wuhan street circuit, where he was twice hit by Comtoyou Racing’s Denis Dupont.

Shedden had taken his first career pole position in the one-lap shootout on Sunday morning, and led the way into Turn 1 where he pushed into a slide by Dupont in the rival Audi RS 3 LMS.

After a long safety car intervention after a multi-car incident, the race resumed and Shedden was then hit again, not directly by Dupont, but by the tyre stack at the apex of Turn 10, after Dupont rammed into it head on and into Shedden’s car, which carried on unabated.

“It’s been an absolutely epic weekend. The car’s just been transformed since last week,” said Shedden to TouringCarTimes. “There’s a lot of work done by the team behind the scenes, and this is the first weekend where I feel like I’m part of the car, and it makes such a difference.

“In Race 3, Denis Dupont hit me at Turn 1, and then not content with hitting me with his car, he hit me with a tyre stack! It was crazy, the sound in the car was just strange. It was one of those surreal moments where I thought ‘I haven’t hit the tyres, have I?’ and then all of the sudden I can see them bouncing, and then I figured out what had happened.”

Shedden’s racked up the most points over the course of the weekend, almost doubling his season’s total, and is now just 42 points away from the top ten in the standings.