- Two-time BTCC champion forced to fight for ninth rostrum result of season
- EXCELR8 Motorsport ace frustrated by lack of pace in Leicestershire
- Bucks-born star promises to ‘keep plugging’ away over final three outings
The BTCC’s official lap record-holder around the ex-Formula 1 venue heading into the event, Ingram got his bid off to the best possible start by topping the timesheets in free practice. Qualifying, however, would deliver only disappointment, as his comparative lack of TOCA Turbo Boost (TTB) – by dint of sitting second in the championship standings – left him a lowly 17th on the grid amongst the 23 high-calibre protagonists in the UK’s premier motor racing series for Saturday’s ‘Race to Pole’.
Notwithstanding two safety car interruptions due to incidents further down the order, the Team VERTU star determinedly rolled up his sleeves to scythe through the pack to eighth position, narrowly missing out on stealing seventh in a dramatic photo-finish as the biggest mover in the field flashed past the chequered flag under three-quarters-of-a-second shy of fifth.
Electing to run the less competitive hard-compound tyres – mandatory for one of the three full-length bouts – in Sunday’s curtain-raising contest and with just two laps of TTB at his disposal compared to many drivers with the maximum allocation of ten, Ingram was aware he would have his work cut out. At the end of an elbows-out affair, he was ultimately obliged to settle for ninth, posting the fastest lap of the hard tyre contingent along the way.
In front of the live ITV4 television cameras and a capacity on-site crowd, race two witnessed a welcome return to the rostrum – but the reigning champion was made to dig deep indeed. After displacing Ricky Collard, triple title-winner Gordon Shedden and Dexter Patterson in swift succession early on to climb to sixth, he rapidly reduced the gap to the leading quintet prior to pulling off gutsy passes on Adam Morgan and Árón Taylor-Smith.
Thereafter, though, and try as he unquestionably did, he found himself unable to overhaul arch-rival Ash Sutton, and the pair were subsequently separated when Dan Rowbottom momentarily slowed exiting the Fogarty Esses on lap ten, with the Ford able to zip past the Mercedes but the #80 Hyundai i30N remaining stuck behind.
At the same spot two laps later, Ingram grittily snatched third place, which he would retain to the flag, but he knew it could have been more, as evidenced by his theoretical quickest lap time. Calculated by adding together each driver’s individual best sectors, it was the fastest in the field.
From eighth on the partially-reversed grid for the day’s finale, the talented Bucks-born ace executed a typically assertive opening tour to advance two spots to sixth. An audacious overtake heading down the Craner Curves then carried him past pole-sitter Chris Smiley into fifth, but that gain would prove to be short-lived as Sutton sent him off-track and bouncing through the gravel at the Old Hairpin – an infraction for which the championship leader was handed a five-second penalty.
The clash dropped Ingram to the tail-end of the top ten, and to compound his woes, he soon found himself run off the road again at the Melbourne Hairpin. Thereafter having to fight against drivers with significantly more boost than him, the 33-year-old Coventry-based racer was unable to regain lost ground and crossed the finish line a frustrated ninth. The campaign continues at Croft in North Yorkshire in just under a fortnight’s time (5-6 September).
Tom Ingram, Driver, Team VERTU, said:
“That was a real anticlimax of a weekend! I enjoy Donington’s ‘GP’ layout, but it wasn’t my friend this year. We were quick out-of-the-box and looked reasonably strong in practice, but we were left scratching our heads after qualifying, because while the car felt mint, the timesheets didn’t reflect that at all, which we didn’t really understand.
“The ‘Race to Pole’ was fairly punchy, and we managed to come through the pack well, which was exactly what we needed to do. It helped having a couple of safety car periods, which closed everything up and enabled me to get a bit more stuck in.
“On Sunday, we got through race one on the hard tyre and I thought we played a blinder by holding our boost back over the opening stages of race two. By the time we got into the top six, I had enough TTB left to be able to deploy on every lap until the end – but I simply wasn’t able to do much with it.
“That was super-frustrating, because it was the best the Hyundai had felt for quite a long time, but it’s tough when you’re stuck in the pack, as all the temperatures start sky-rocketing and your dashboard lights up like a Christmas tree. Race three was similarly looking really promising until the contact with Ash [Sutton], after which we were pretty much powerless against all the guys with more boost.
“We’re happy with the car, but we still have pace to find because we’re clearly lacking that last little bit and aren’t quite where we want to be. Not being able to compete against Ash when we had the better tyre and greater TTB was tough to take, and underlines the fact that the title’s not really mine to win this year – it’s very much his to lose.
“We’ve had a few too many issues on our side, with component failures outside of our control that have unfortunately put us on the back foot and left us with a lot of points to try to make up, but we’re doing everything we can, and we’ve just got to keep plugging away and hope we can pick up any pieces if they happen to fall…”
Images: Jakob Ebrey Photography