Speedworks Motorsport hail “faultless” Tom Ingram win

Speedworks Motorsport team boss Christian Dick hailed a “faultless” performance from his driver Tom Ingram in the opening race of the BTCC season at Brands Hatch, achieved despite the 23-year-old suffering with illness throughout the weekend.

Ingram has almost completely lost his voice, leading to some interesting pit-to-car radio traffic, but he made the perfect start from second on the grid to pass polesitter Jeff Smith, keep ahead of the Eurotech Racing Honda Civic Type-R, then maintain a gap when the sister Civic of Team Dynamics’ Gordon Shedden made it up into second.

The Toyota Avensis crossed the line just over three seconds clear of the reigning champion, mirroring the result Ingram achieved in the first race of the 2016 season.

Speaking to TouringCarTimes, Dick said: “You can’t fault that, can you? He planned to get a better getwaway than Jeff [Smith], executed that perfectly and pulled a gap when he could.

“He then maintained that gap when Gordon [Shedden] had got past Jeff into second. It was fautless.

“The debrief’s going to be quite interesting because he’s pretty much lost his voice. I think there will be a lot of diagrams drawn! The adrenaline’s going to carry him through the day.

“It most definitely is harder [to communicate]. He was struggling with it yesterday too, and there were a few radio messages where we were looking at each other on the pitwall trying to work out what he was trying to relay to us.

“It certainly slows the process down, but it’s not going to cause us too much of a problem.”

With two races left to run today, Dick said the team would be concentrating on bagging solid points across the rest of the day – something they weren’t always able to do last season.

“We had a good feeling from winter testing and we’d hoped to be at the sharp end. The plan was to go out and try and have a strong a first race as possible,” said Dick. “From then, we’re just thinking about the points – if it’s a sixth or seventh place, that’s fine. We’ve won the first race, now let’s concentrate on the points.”