Podiums are “like London buses” for Tom Ingram

Tom Ingram ended his sophomore year with Speedworks Motorsport in fine style, equalling his career-best second place in Sunday’s second race at Brands Hatch and joking that podiums are now coming along “like London buses.”

Ingram pushed second race winner Mat Jackson all the way, coming within less than half a second of a maiden touring car win before eventually conceding second best to the Motorbase Performance man.

Ingram was nevertheless delighted with his first non-reverse grid podium, and was again full of praise for the job his team have done in 2015.

“I’m hugely pleased – it’s like London buses. You wait all year for a podium and then two come within weekends of each other,” said Ingram to TouringCarTimes.

“We knew we had a bit of an advantage. We were on the harder tyre with no ballast against people on the soft tyre with ballast, so to be honest it was our podium to lose. I’m over the moon.

“Again we’ve shown it’s not a flash in the pan because we’ve been consistently there all weekend.”

Ingram ended the season 13th in the drivers’ championship and fifth in the independents’ standings, and said the results achieved matched the goals set out at the start of the season.

He said: “At the start of the year we said we wanted this car to be a consistently strong finishing car, and I think we can tick that off our list at the end of this year.

“We’ve had some really strong results and two podiums – we were gobsmacked to get one, let alone two.”

Ingram was also relaxed about his prospects of returning to the championship in 2016.

“We’ll wait and see. We need to see how the budget goes. We have some awesome sponsors on board for this year, so we need to have a word with those and see what the plan is moving forwards,” he said.

“I think we’ve done a superb job for what we’ve had this year and it would be a shame to see it go. But there’s many things open. It can all change very quickly, but I am very happy.”