Tom Ingram proud to have gone down fighting at Brands Hatch

Tom Ingram believes he and EXCELR8 did the best they have ever done in the British Touring Car Championship this season, despite missing out on clinching the coveted crown at Brands Hatch.

Chasing after a second career title in the UK’s premier motor racing series, Ingram went down fighting at the Kent circuit as he went head-to-head with Jake Hill – who he was tied at the summit of the standings with going into the weekend.

The Hyundai driver charged onto the front row in qualifying however found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time at the start of race one as he got caught up in an incident between Ash Sutton and Josh Cook at DAruids.

Escaping without damage, Ingram dropped to as low as ninth at one stage but clawed his way back up to third by the chequered flag, which then set him up for a sensational victory in race two where he dispatched both Hill and Colin Turkington in the early laps.

With rain falling and trailing Hill by a single point, Ingram went into the final race of the season with nothing to lose and quickly found a way past his title rival. However, as the race unfolded Ingram soon began to struggle for pace and he eventually dropped back to sixth.

That result meant that the former champion would finish the year in second place in the Drivers’ Championship, eight points behind new champion Hill.

“First of all, enormous credit and huge congratulations to Jake [Hill], MB Motorsport and West Surrey Racing – they’ve had a fabulous season and Jake thoroughly deserves the title,” said Ingram.

“On our side, we’ve done the best job I think we’ve ever done. In the end, we came up just short, which is clearly tough to take, but sometimes it comes down to a bit of luck and fine margins.

“Naturally, we’re disappointed with the end result, but we can’t be disappointed in the slightest with the performance we’ve shown over the course of the season; every single weekend, we’ve rocked up with a car that has felt utterly phenomenal and such a pleasure to drive.

“We were staggeringly fast in the dry in the first two races at Brands Hatch, and had we not been wiped out at Druids at the start of the day, potentially we could have had two wins and a very different story.
 
“Everybody at Team Bristol Street Motors has worked so hard, and the car felt really alive and on-the-edge. I was so pumped after winning race two and the Hyundai felt great again on the way to the grid for race three, which gave me a lot of confidence, but for some reason, after the first few laps, we just had no front-end performance. Maybe we picked up some damage on the opening lap, I don’t know.
 
“We’d done everything we needed to do and where we needed to be, and then all of a sudden, it was like somebody flicked the ‘off’ switch and that was that. I was three seconds off the pace over the last five laps and an absolute sitting duck, which was massively frustrating so we’ve clearly got some head-scratching to do as to why it went wrong and where we need to improve.
 
“I was always going to take it down to the wire and under no circumstances was I going to roll over, but ultimately, we simply couldn’t extract any more out of it. It’s really disappointing to lose right at the end, but to lose like that when you can’t even fight is doubly disappointing.”