Tom Ingram pleased with ‘better than expected’ top five

Tom Ingram said he was pleased to lead the front-wheel drive challenge in qualifying at Knockhill after securing fifth on the grid for the latest rounds of the BTCC season.

The Speedworks driver picked up a place on the third row of the grid in a topsy-turvy session in Scotland that saw times tumble as circuit conditions improved, with Ingram the only non-rear drive car inside the top six.

The former points leader will be keen to try and pick up a solid score on Sunday after seeing a run of misfortune derail his championship challenge and he admitted that his Saturday performance had exceeded his expectations.

“Fifth is more than we expected from qualifying,” he said. “I know I certainly didn’t think we’d be this high, but it was one of the sessions where you could easily have been first or 31st – it could have gone to shit in an instant.

“I think we have the pace to stay ahead of the cars that are behind us on the grid so the plan is to try and hold station behind the rear-wheel drive cars in the first race and see where we end up going into race two.

“We came here in the mindset that we wanted to get some points on the board and recover some ground as Oulton Park and Croft were a real kick in the nuts before the summer break. We know we have the pace to have still been right up there but things haven’t gone our way and tomorrow we have to aim to stay out of trouble and score as many points as we can.”