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Gordon Shedden: Winning the British Touring Car Championship 2012

Looking back, my hero when I was growing up was BTCC racer John Cleland. It was through watching John that first got me interested and led to me going to a circuit, first to watch, but then to get involved in racing.

Looking back on my career to date, my favourite memory has to be of winning the British Touring Car Championship in 2012.

The 2012 season was a culmination of so many years of ups and downs in motorsport. There were plenty of years where it looked like I maybe wasn’t going to be able to go racing again and sponsors had fallen away, but all of a sudden everything came together with joining the Honda team.

2011 was a great year, but a tough one too, finishing second in the championship, but I got so, so close to winning it, I almost got to experience that amazing high but then it’s just not quite there, whereas this last year was just the ultimate. It was total euphoria, everything I ever wanted. To see the emotion on everyone’s faces, all the mechanics and Eddie my engineer, they lived every lap with me and I think they were probably more nervous than I was going during that final race at Brand Hatch. It was such a great team effort.

Thinking back to the last lap at Brand Hatch, it was quite strange. At the time, I didn’t know if I’d done enough to win the championship, the team decided not to tell me I had got fastest lap, just in case I did anything silly, but at the time I knew it was good as I knew I was ahead of Matt & Jason, I just didn’t know if it was going to be enough.

There is an image of me in the car, half way down paddock hill, after the race has finished when the team got on the radio to me and said “you have done it, you are now British Touring Car Champion”. They say the eyes can be the gateway to the soul and at that moment, in that image, it is clearly the point when it kicked in that I’d done enough. It was such a blur of emotions, everything had come together, it was a massive high and yet such a relief, there was so much buzzing round my head that I almost felt nothing, it was too much to take in and it really didn’t sink in and even a couple of days later, I don’t think it had. There’s not many things that can leave me speechless, but this was one moment. Even just thinking about it now, there are so many amazing memories that flood back and it makes me smile when I talk about it.

Gordon Shedden

2012 British Touring Car Champion

www.gordonshedden.com

Follow on Twitter @gordonshedden

Memory added on January 16, 2013

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