Speedworks’ Tom Ingram doesn’t rue loss of pole-winning form

Tom Ingram qualified in fourth position for the sixth round of the 2016 British Touring Car Championship at Snetterton, and the Speedworks Motorsport Toyota driver is happy to be ahead of his key rivals in the drivers’ championship, with the two-time pole-sitter saying that the improvements seen by Subaru mean taking a third pole would always have been difficult.

Ingram is currently placed sixth in the drivers’ standings, seven points behind West Surrey Racing BMW driver Jack Goff and four ahead of Triple Eight MG driver Ashley Sutton, meaning he carries 33kg of success ballast this weekend.

“I’m happy with P4 to be honest. Against the people we’re directly competing against in the championship, we’ve kind of out-qualified them,” said Ingram to TouringCarTimes.

“The guys that are ahead who are three-tenths faster of us, there’s a little bit of time to find to those guys, but they’re also a bit further behind in the championship and haven’t got the ballast we’re carrying, so I’m very happy with what we’ve done.

“I’m looking more at people like Jack Goff and Ash Sutton , and (Motorbase Ford’s) Andrew Jordan, and want to try and take points off those guys so we can move up a few positions. I think we’ve just got to take what we can. If there’s podiums to be had, we’ll take them, else we’ll just settle for points.”

Ingram took pole position at Brands Hatch and Thruxton, but although it was Honda’s Gordon Shedden that took pole position for Snetterton today, it’s the Team BMR Subaru of Colin Turkington who has shown lightning pace in qualifying since the team introduced their first wave of updates after Thruxton.

“It was always going to come, and the Subaru pace is what it is at the minute, they’ve got quite an advantage,” said Ingram.