Tom Ingram: “We got as much out of the weekend as we could have done”

Tom Ingram believes he extracted everything he could out of his weekend at Oulton Park, scoring three podiums and reducing the points deficit to BTCC points leader Ash Sutton.

Determined to make inroads into the 57-point advantage that Sutton arrived at the Cheshire venue with, the EXCELR8 driver began the weekend by finishing hot on the heels of his rival in Saturday’s Qualifying Race.

Choosing to run the soft tyre in race one, Ingram claimed hard-fought third place finish before then producing a superlative drive to add to his silverware on the less favourable hard tyre in race two.

Tasked with starting from tenth place in the reverse grid finale, the reigning champion closed out his weekend with a fine drive to finish third and with it, ensure that he goes into the summer break nine points closer to Sutton.

“Overall, I reckon we got as much out of the weekend as we could have done, considering our TTB allocation going into it,” said the two-time title winner. “As a team, we’ve knuckled down and worked really, really hard to overcome the setbacks we’ve faced over the opening rounds.

“The goal was to reduce the gap in the points table into the forties, which we achieved, and we had an incredibly fast car throughout, which is really encouraging.

“We’ve ended the first part of the season very strongly – three podiums around Oulton is fairly difficult to pull off, but we did it and now we can go into the summer break with a spring in our step.

“I think we’ll be even stronger over the remainder of the season, and I’m already looking forward to properly taking the fight to Ash at Thruxton. It’s still clearly a tall order, but if we can keep chipping away like this, it’s definitely doable.”