Last year Shiels recorded the fastest lap in the history of racing at Wakefield Park during the Australian Time Attack.

He hit a top speed of 267km/hr in clocking a 53:06 seconds lap in the Tilton Racing Mitsubishi Evo.

It was an effort Shiels and the team at Tilton were confident of being able to better this year, but nine days out from the planned July 24 event organisers were forced to cancel due to COVID regulations.

"We knew we could have gone quicker last year and now with the extra changes we'd made we were hoping to go a lot faster. It would have been really cool," the talented Bathurst driver said.

"We'd put in a fair bit of work actually. We've tested it a few times since the event last year and found a few things we wanted to improve and upgrade, so the boys have spent a lot of time changing some of the steering geometry and rebuilding the engine and changing all the turbo and intake set up.

"We had it dyno tuned last week just to make sure the changes were all good and we were ready to go, but yeah, it's all over."

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On Tuesday this week Shiels and the team at Tilton were dealt another blow. The fifth round of TCR Australia Series which was set for Queensland's Morgan Park was also cancelled.

"That was another kick to us," Shiels said.

In his debut season in TCR driving the Tilton Hyundai i30N, Shiels is currently ranked 10^th outright. It is a position that he is confident he can improve if given that chance.

At the moment he and the team can not event conduct a test day. They've only used one of the six allocated to them.

"We had planned some testing, we were going to go up to Morgan Park to test and we had one booked in at Eastern Creek a few weeks ago that got cancelled," Shiels said.

"We want to be able to test, but we're just not able to go anywhere at the moment, it's all pretty bad at the moment. At least this year we've got a bit of racing in, last year we got absolutely nothing, the whole season got cancelled.

"I think we are getting on top of the car, we've made a few changes and we've learned throughout the season thus far. Hopefully we can have a good end to the season."

At this stage the next round of TCR will be at Sandown in September followed by the season finale at Mount Panorama at the end of November as part of the Bathurst International program.

Shiels is also hoping he gets a chance to race the team's Evo at Sydney Motorsport Park in October.

"It really does make you hungry, especially sitting at home watching the V8s racing, it does make you want to get out there, it does feel like forever since we raced," he said.

"We've got a little bit of hope left with World Time Attack coming up in October at Eastern Creek, so fingers crossed that one is all good."

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