Should there be a tissue shortage on the supermarket shelves of the Silverstone area this week, then the penultimate round of the British Touring Car Championship at the venue will surely be held accountable. The tears flowed at Restart Racing when Dan Lloyd scored the team’s first outright victory in the series; then they cascaded again at Alliance Racing’s NAPA squad when Sam Osborne finally broke his duck, hours after his 200th BTCC start. And that was just a day after the highly promising Daryl DeLeon had claimed his first pole position.
Around all this, Tom Ingram and Ash Sutton continued the serious business of fighting for the 2025 title. Ingram’s sixth BTCC win of the season helped him in his quest – but only a little bit. Over the weekend, he inched up his advantage over Sutton from 32 points to 33 going into the final round on the Brands Hatch Grand Prix Circuit on 4-5 October. No one else is in the hunt.
This was always going to be a tricky weekend for both. The Silverstone National Circuit takes just 57 seconds to lap in an NGTC car, increasing the handicap from their TOCA Turbo Boost deficit. Furthermore, with only one quick corner, the magnitude of a TTB offset is amplified by the emphasis upon acceleration out of the slow corners.
Ingram, who headed into the weekend with a worst grid position this season of fourth, couldn’t even get out of Q1. The one second per lap of TTB granted to his Excelr8 Motorsport Hyundai i30 N Fastback was largely to blame; so too were the iffy weather conditions. “We slightly chaosed ourselves,” confessed Ingram, adding the invention of new verbs to his racing driver skillset. “We kind of went for a bit of a halfway-house set-up – half dry, half wet – and it just didn’t work out. And it’s just that we don’t have those three tenths in the TTB, which I’m fine with. I’ve been around here for long enough now to understand that when it’s a scenario like that, there’s no point getting yourself rattled.”
Ingram would therefore line up a lowly 14th for race one, but the Alliance Ford Focus ST of Sutton was well in sight – the four-time champion did make it into Q2, but that was only because of the weather foresight of his team in Q1. Once he was onto a dry track in the second phase of qualifying, he was doomed on his three seconds per lap of TTB. As a result, he was 12th on the grid.
It’s always easy to criticise in hindsight, but the looming clouds looked as though they were arriving imminently as Q1 kicked off. Sure enough, most of the front-wheel-drive cars were on their out-laps when the shower fell upon Silverstone after their traditional ‘two-laps-then-tyre-cross’ routine. Alliance had decided that Sutton and Dan Cammish should do just one lap before their tyre crossing, which meant they were already on a lap when the rain arrived.
Hamilton needed a quick escape as his car caught fire in race one
Photo by: JEP
“I think we played a very clever game,” pointed out Sutton. “We just did an out and an in, and got some form of temp in the tyre, and did a lap before the rain came. If it was a clean, dry run, we wouldn’t have made it out of Q1. Trying to overcome the deployment button around here is nigh-on impossible.”
With the title contenders in close proximity in the midfield, it was obvious that both Sutton and Ingram would use the medium Goodyear tyre in the first race. They eventually climbed to seventh (Ingram) and eighth (Sutton) behind the leading six soft-shod cars, before the safety car annulled the last quarter of the race after the unfortunate Nicolas Hamilton had to escape from a spectacular fire in his Un-Limited Motorsport Cupra on the Wellington Straight.
Ingram had leapfrogged Sutton when the Ford made contact with Charles Rainford’s West Surrey Racing BMW at Becketts on the fourth lap. “Charles squeezed me and I can’t just disappear,” reckoned Sutton. “Tom and me both deployed down the back straight but he just cruised straight past us and he had the move done and dusted. I tried to do the switcheroo and go round the outside [at Brooklands], but he gave me the touring car lean and squeezed me off on the exit.”
“They [Excelr8] just seemed to have such good performance in the car, if I’d finished second on the soft, we would have wasted it. Luckily we got to second on the medium and it paid off. To pull that amount of places was great, and meant we had an ace up our sleeve for the last one” Ash Sutton
“You’ve just got to be on your toes to know when and when not to attack, and a moment like that, you don’t get many,” added Ingram. “You can never waste a run like that.”
Later on, Ingram would also ruffle Sutton’s team-mate Dan Rowbottom with his shoulder-charge down the inside at Luffield. He was on feisty form, but it was all fair in the world of touring car racing.
Then came the big surprise of Sunday: while Ingram went for his set of soft tyres in race two, Sutton opted for mediums again. Sadly, it meant that we would not really see them battle each other again over the day, because Sutton would have the softs for race three, with Ingram back on mediums. But there was sound reasoning from Sutton’s point of view.
Ingram and Sutton battled head-to-head in the first race, but with differing strategies were largely kept apart in the next two
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“To try and beat Tom on the same tyre, it would still have been a hard task,” explained Sutton, who had overruled his team. “So we just made it a little bit harder for ourselves and did it on the medium. They [Excelr8] just seemed to have such good performance in the car, if I’d finished second on the soft, we would have wasted it. Luckily we got to second on the medium and it paid off. To pull that amount of places was great, and meant we had an ace up our sleeve for the last one.”
This was Sutton’s great performance of Sunday. While Ingram sailed his chirpy way from seventh on the grid to the front within four laps, Sutton completed his rise from eighth to second, past a host of cars also shod on the medium tyres, when he passed early leader Jake Hill’s WSR BMW 330i M Sport into the Brooklands left-hander with just over nine laps remaining.
“Our gameplan was to seize big points, grab them, especially with us being on a large amount of boost,” remarked Ingram of one of the easiest BTCC wins he will ever have. “That was the best opportunity we were going to have. But it was important: ‘If we’re doing softs, we have to win this, there’s no other option.’”
When 1981 British Grand Prix winner John Watson pulled ‘12’ in the reversed-grid draw, that consigned our two contenders to their second midfield starts of the day. No problem for ‘Wattie’ in Long Beach or Detroit, but a tougher task over 22 laps of the squiddly little Silverstone layout.
From 11th on the grid, Sutton used those soft tyres to quickly get up to third, but thereafter could make little progress on the leading duo. Reversed-grid poleman Osborne was the only top-10 starter on softs. Here was his big chance, and he pulled it off to perfection, although the medium-tyred Speedworks Motorsport Toyota Corolla GR Sport of Josh Cook was breathing down his neck for most of the race.
Osborne couldn’t believe it, and Cook’s tyre-locking escapades – “I had a disadvantage on the mediums and I had to make it up with additional effort” – finally took their toll, the Toyota falling back over the last couple of laps. Sutton finished almost three seconds behind Cook: “They obviously had the benefit of a fair few more laps of boost, which allowed them to gap me, and we were just very much stalemate – we couldn’t close the gap down.”
Osborne’s maiden BTCC win had a feelgood factor to it
Photo by: JEP
Sutton was among many who praised the drive of Osborne, whose father Pete is the owner of Alliance. It was a happy moment for a family that has put so much into the sport, not only through Alliance but also through patronage of young drivers across multiple series, and apprenticeships to get people into the sport.
Ditto for Restart Racing in the opening race. Lloyd had progressed his Hyundai relatively comfortably through to Q3, where he didn’t quite have enough to improve on fourth. Rain fell again here to make the track truly wet, and the late changes onto grooved tyres for DeLeon and Gordon Shedden came at the perfect time to put them on the front row. While that was a breakthrough pole for the young Anglo-Filipino, it was, remarkably, the Scottish three-time champion’s first escape from Q1 all season in his Speedworks Toyota.
DeLeon was quick on Saturday in all conditions, highlighting the strength of the BMW here. He also led the first race off the grid, but a couple of lock-ups at Becketts caused a flat-spot, a vibration and a sink through the field. The day ended even worse, with a driveshaft failure on the grid for the final race.
“You couldn’t really settle into anything because you had mini-battles throughout the race, trying to keep an eye on Ash, and because he’s overtaken I really need to overtake somebody as well. It was a bit of a high-speed game of chess. But I thought we played it as good as we could have done” Tom Ingram
Shedden passed DeLeon to lead briefly, but Lloyd had leapfrogged both of them plus Hill to get in front by the end of the second lap. From here, it was a case of using the TTB when necessary to fend off Hill, who made it up to second on the fifth lap but had four tours less boost available. By the time of the safety car, Lloyd still had two laps of TTB, Hill just one, with third-placed Shedden on three and opining that “it could have been quite fruity” had the race restarted.
But take nothing away from Lloyd, for whom this was the first win since the 2022 season finale. “It was quite a scrap [early on], and I anticipated it all in the right way and benefited from it,” bubbled the likeable Yorkshireman, who always wears his heart on his sleeve. “I was really pleased with the first couple of laps, and as soon as I got in the lead the pace was really strong. I knew Jake had slightly less boost than me, and I used it in the right way at the right time so I had more left than him at the end. With no safety car I’m pretty damn sure I’d have won.”
For his part, this was the start of a fine day for Hill. To his second in race one, he added a third later on, just holding off the soft-tyred Speedworks Toyota of Aron Taylor-Smith at the finish. Then, in the finale, he got into a juicy battle with Ingram, finally beating the points leader to fourth. This entailed a squeeze of the Hyundai into an only-just-wider-than-a-Hyundai space against the pitwall, and a rub at Becketts, all while the soft-tyred Rowbottom was sticking his oar in with what looked like a bid to annoy team-mate Sutton’s title rival.
Lloyd also enjoyed a first – a maiden BTCC win for Restart Racing and his first win since 2022
Photo by: JEP
“It was rather stressful to be honest, because it was a race of quarters,” said Ingram. “You couldn’t really settle into anything because you had mini-battles throughout the race, trying to keep an eye on Ash, and because he’s overtaken I really need to overtake somebody as well. It was a bit of a high-speed game of chess. But I thought we played it as good as we could have done.”
For Hill’s part, he will be handing over his crown at Brands, but is now just four points behind third-placed Cammish and ahead of Rowbottom. Unthinkable a few weeks ago. Both Dans were out of luck in their Fords. Cammish was excluded from Q1 when the front splitter failed the ride-height test, and a broken clamp on the turbo ruled him out of race two, from which Rowbottom was sidelined with engine failure.
“Not normally this year have I been able to battle with Tom properly, but I kept him back and went forward again,” sighed a happy Hill. “There’s one goal now, because I refuse to end my year with not finishing top-three in the championship.”
Make no mistake, that ‘Laser Beemer’ will be a proper fly in the ointment of the Ingram-v-Sutton showdown.
Hill will have to hand over his BTCC crown to either Ingram or Sutton next month – with the Excelr8 driver strong favourite going into Brands Hatch
Photo by: JEP
