Tom Ingram: “It could have been a lot worse”

Tom Ingram said he was keen to look at the positives despite losing his lead in the BTCC standings at Thruxton.

The Speedworks driver had held the points lead after both Brands Hatch and Donington Park but was aware that the maximum ballast onboard his Toyota Avensis could hamper his chances at the quickest circuit on the calendar.

Despite that, Ingram qualified in the top six only to be demoted to tenth for a track limits infringement.

However, an electrical issue forced him to retire from the opening race before a fine comeback in race two saw Ingram come through to twelfth spot whilst the forward progress continued in race three as he posted the fastest BTCC lap seen at Thruxton en-route to seventh.

It means the reigning Independents’ champion now lies third in the standings, eleven points down on new leader Adam Morgan.

“The positive from the weekend is that we have lost weight for Oulton, which is something that crippled us going there last year,” he said. “Everything happens for a reason and whilst race one wasn’t ideal, we just have to accept that something happened that we couldn’t control and the end result is that we come out of the weekend with less weight.

“I’m a positive kind of guy and whilst it was tough to have to retire from race one, we weren’t in the best position at the time and we came back to score later in the day and got the quickest ever lap at Thruxton – which showed our pace.

“If this proves to be our worst weekend then I can deal with that, as it certainly isn’t an Oulton Park or Croft from last year.”

With the likes of Matt Neal and Colin Turkington scoring well at Thruxton, a number of the more experienced members of the grid took strides to move up the championship order but Ingram said he was simply focusing on his job at hand in terms of his title bid.

“You’d be foolish to discount anyone in this game and you have to show the likes of Matt and Colin respect,” he said. “You know that they will come good and that the cream will rise to the top, but we know we just have to focus on ourselves and doing the best we can.

“With some weight off the car, we’ll go to Oulton Park and hopefully can have a better Saturday and recover the points we lost here. Instead of worrying about having to lose ballast after qualifying and race one, we can just look to attack from the start.”