Maximum Motorsport’s Josh Cook was highly critical of Gordon Shedden after the race three contact which ended his final race at Oulton Park, with Cook adamant that he did nothing that wouldn’t normally be expected.
Cook was battling with Shedden for a podium position in the final British Touring Car Championship race at Oulton Park when the duo made contact on lap two, with the Honda braking the right-rear toe-link on Cook’s car heading into Old Hall Corner.
Shedden went on to win the race, whilst Cook limped back to the pits to retire, ending a weekend where he had taken another two top ten finishes for the team.
“I’ve already watched the incident back, and he says that I moved under braking,” said Cook to TouringCars.Net. “As you can see, it’s a load of rubbish.
“I’m one for making sure that I’m nice and respectful – I don’t say anything that I shouldn’t as I’m representing a lot of people. But if you watch the race back, watch how he’s in the back of my car at every single braking area after a straight.
“We went into the last corner into Lodge and he was just in the back of my car the whole way through, and then as we came up around the top he was just starting to get an overlap. He wasn’t alongside me, and I just slowly [came over]. There was a small amount of rubbing, nothing you wouldn’t normally expect.
“Then he’s gone back over to the left and I’m in the middle of the circuit, so I knew what he was thinking and he’s already decided that he’s going to go for a lunge at turn one.
“As I’ve hit the brakes he’s tried to dart right and he’s just miscalculated how quickly he needed to go right, how quickly I was going to slow doing and how close we were.
“He can try and put that on me as much as he wants, but if you watch the video back, I’m in a straight line in the middle of the track and I’ve been ploughed into on my rear-right wheel in the back of it, there’s no damage on the face of it, just in the back of it. It speaks for itself.”
“I’d have a lot more respect for him if he’d just put his hands up and say he made a mistake, that he didn’t quite get it right and to say sorry. If he’s going to try and put it on me it says more about his character than anything else.”
Shedden, who was later given a verbal warning for the incident, said that he had backed out of several attempted passes in order to not pitch Cook into the pit wall, blaming Cook for coming across on him approaching Turn One.
“To be fair, for about three laps before that he was all over the place,” said Shedden to TouringCars.Net. “I’ve been up the inside and up the outside and he’s been coming across when I’ve got an overlap.
“Three or four times I’ve backed out of it to let him survive and not put him in the pit wall and in the end I had no idea what he was going to do.
“I made a good move – a move that I’ve done before on Colin Turkington and various others into Turn 1 – and he’s obviously seen it late and tried to cover it, but unfortunately once you’re committed and you’ve made the move, you can’t vacate the space that you’re already in.
“You can tell that to break the rear toe-link shows it’s a side impact, with him coming back across, to do that damage on the car, which is unfortunate.
“It was a genuine move. Once you’re committed on the brakes, you can’t get out of the way. He wasn’t maybe expecting it, but covered it a little too late by the time I was there.”