Tom Ingram battles gremlins for triple top ten

Tom Ingram admitted he was relieved to have only lost three points to Colin Turkington over the course of the weekend at Thruxton after technical issues threatened to hamper his challenge.

Ingram went into the weekend sitting 15 points behind Turkington in the standings but looked set to take big points out of the BMW man when he topped the times in opening practice.

However, the EXCELR8 driver would be unable to replicate that pace when qualifying came around, with engine issues leaving Ingram back in 13th on the grid.

Whilst that was still ahead of Turkington on the grid, ‘serious powertrain concerns’ resulted in Ingram undergoing an engine change ahead of race day, with Swindon Powertrain forced to introduce a number of special measures to try and avoid any failures in the three races.

Despite concerns about the engine, Ingram was able to take ninth in race one before taking sixth in race two – on both occasions finishing ahead of Turkington on the road.

Gearbox gremlins in race three however meant Ingram had to settle for seventh, leaving him 18 points down on Turkington with two rounds left to run having slipped to third in the standings.

“On the surface it would be easy to be disappointed this weekend, but when you look at the standings, we’ve only lost a handful of points to Colin despite the real possibility that the issues identified on Saturday could have resulted in three non-finishes,” he said.

“We came in 15 points behind and we go away 18 behind, so things certainly could have been a lot worse and hopefully we’ll get to the end of the season and look at a weekend like this as being one that won the title for us rather than one that lost it. This is especially as the team worked tirelessly into the wee hours on Saturday evening/Sunday morning to implement bush fixes to give us a chance of finishing three races.

“We were on the back foot a bit after qualifying which didn’t allow us to really maximise the limited potential we had, but we just had to put it behind it and focus on doing the best job we could when we were out of position on the grid. We fought back and all things considered, I feel we did a good job despite the underlying problems we had to manage.”