But the Dalgety Bay race ace insists that he and his Honda Yuasa team will not get carried away by the early success of the new Civic Type R car that has driven him to third place in the standings after the competition’s opening two rounds.

After clinching a maiden victory in the Civic while on his way to collecting 32 points in the first round at Brands Hatch, ‘Flash’ stepped on the accelerator and produced a second- and third-place finish in the first and last races of the second round at Donnington Park to end eight points adrift of team-mate and championship leader Matt Neal.

It has been impressive opening in a car that was first tested only two weeks before Brands Hatch and Shedden (36) told Press Sport, “It is probably a better start than we had hoped for but you always keep moving the goalposts and are hoping for more. We have exceeded expectations so far so I am pretty happy with the way things have gone but we are not getting ahead of ourselves. We’re not taking anything for granted but the car has been full of promise so far.” After qualifying in second place, Shedden was overtaken immediately at the start of the opening race by Jason Plato, who then got the better of Colin Turkington to lead the way and go on to take victory, leaving the West Fifer to battle with Turkington for second place. In lap seven, Shedden made his move on the run to the Craner Curves and held off his rival’s challenge for an excellent start but a 14th place in race two was not part of the script.

He bounced back in style in the final action of the day, however, with a superb drive from further down the grid to take third place comfortably by more than 2.5 seconds ahead of Robert Collard. Shedden added, “It is difficult to score well in all three races so to get two podiums was really good. We struggled on the soft tyres in the middle race but qualifying was good and overall we took advantage of the things that came our way.

“We’ll try to get a bit of testing done before Thruxton and let’s see if we can get some more silverware there.” The third round of the BTCC at Thruxton will take place on 9th-10th May.