He looked, well, a little less tense than this time last year, prior to the race that would define the destiny of the British Touring Car Championship.
Tom Ingram is a creature of habit – he has joked in the past about “being OCD” – so there he was doing his Tom Ingram things prior to the second race of the Brands Hatch season finale. A quick trip in the direction of the gents’. Back to the Excelr8 Motorsport truck. Down the steps again, this time zipping up his racesuit. A quick arm around the shoulder from his dad Bruce. Into the garage and donning his HANS Device, the clicky-clacky straps finally done up. A word with his own engineer Spencer Aldridge and team-mate Tom Chilton’s man Barry Plowman. A cheery exchange with his mechanic. Then on went the gloves and helmet, ITV Sport cameraman and photographers studiously ignored. And, finally, climbing aboard his Hyundai i30 N Fastback. Drowning out the noise, all the distractions.
“I think I had a good poker face for most of the weekend, but I was feeling the pressure, the nerves,” Ingram confessed. “But once you’re strapped in the car and you’re cracking on, you tend to forget it all. Thankfully I’m fairly thick anyway, so once I get going I don’t really think about too much!
“All of the messages were ‘just bring it back, don’t mess up now’, and it was almost a level of pressure I’d not really expected of ‘don’t make a mistake’ rather than ‘crack on with it’.”
In 2024, Ingram went into the very last race in a battle with Jake Hill he would ultimately lose. This time around, all he had to do was score a few points to clinch his second title – and put a fifth beyond the reach of Ash Sutton – with a race to spare. Hence the different pressure.
And that is exactly what he did.
It was emphatic, really. In the opening race, Ingram had stretched his points advantage over Sutton by finishing four places ahead of him in fifth. He had qualified the Hyundai seventh, then made progress on the medium Goodyear tyre. “I couldn’t really have expected or asked for race one to go any more to plan,” he smiled. “Just a sensible, clean, easy, out-of-trouble race with Ash behind, which secured us an easier race two. It took the pressure away, which is ideal. It really worked out.”
Victory in race two sealed Ingram the 2025 BTCC title in style
Photo by: JEP
That put Ingram in prime position for the sequel, able to use the option soft rubber whereas all four of those in front of him on the grid were compelled to take the medium.
Given the pace of the Hyundai, was it tempting to save the soft compound for a glory run in race three and try to win the title by battling equally tyred competitors? “Spencer and I had no end of conversations about it,” replied Ingram, “and we kind of went down the same strategy as we did at Silverstone [scene of the previous round]: to get the first one out of the way, get a load of boost in the car, and almost guarantee yourself a good result in race two. Honestly, you fire some boost in this thing and some soft tyres, and it’s an honour to drive it. It’s in a world of its own.”
Sutton worked his Alliance Racing-run NAPA Ford Focus ST through brilliantly from ninth to second, on the medium tyres, but only a mid-race double-safety-car infestation prevented Ingram from utterly destroying the opposition. To add salt into the wounds, Ingram only bothered using one lap of the five TOCA Turbo Boosts to which he was entitled. That was the final time around, and he set fastest lap. The championship was his.
Things had begun to go wrong for Sutton on Saturday, when he qualified four places below Ingram, in 11th. Ingram has only twice failed to make it to Q3 this season – each of the last two rounds – and this one was easily explained. Compounding his allocated one second per lap of TTB (to the 15s of the majority of the field) was an incredibly close Q2 – just 0.165s covered the top nine. “I think we could have got into Q3, but I don’t think we would have gone any faster than we did,” he chirped. “I think seventh was about our pace today, but we’re a tenth and a half off, so it’s super-close.”
“I went into Q2 with a bit of confidence in our package and where we could be. It came as a bit of a kick in the nuts to have the issue in Q2 and not to be able to progress” Ash Sutton
Sutton, on 3s per lap of TTB, faced a chasm of over 0.7s to making the cut for Q3. “We had an issue with tyres,” he explained. “I’m not going to disclose too much – just something that really hurt us in terms of performance. Obviously Q1 we were quite comfortable, car balance was good, it was our first time on softs, there was definitely more to come. That lap wasn’t the best.
“I went into Q2 with a bit of confidence in our package and where we could be – at that point we were faster than the Dans [team-mates Cammish, who would qualify on the front row, and Rowbottom]. It came as a bit of a kick in the nuts to have the issue in Q2 and not to be able to progress.”
Sutton, it should be said, clarified that there was nothing wrong with the tyres, that “it was just an internal issue that we messed up with”.
Struggles in qualifying and race one put Sutton on the back foot
Photo by: JEP
That played a role in hampering his progress in race one. Far from the expected Sutton charge up the order, he had to use all his racing guile to win a battle for ninth with Independents title contender Chris Smiley. “The car just wasn’t in a nice place at all,” he related of his understeer struggles. “We didn’t get a true reading in qualifying with the issues we had in Q2. Bit of a nightmare, bit of a bummer, but we made a big shift [in set-up] for race two and managed to turn it around for races two and three.”
Sutton and engineer Antonio Carrozza reasoned that there was no point using the soft tyre for that decisive race two. Better to hope that ‘Lady Luck’ turned her favours against Ingram on that occasion, and keep the option rubber in reserve for the finale.
“This has been our argument all year,” he emphasised. “We’ve been always offset on the tyres because we can’t race them [Ingram and the Hyundai] on the same tyre, we haven’t got that performance. For us to take it to Tom on the same tyre, they’ve just got the engine performance to outpace us. We had to be clever, save the soft for the end and I think it worked.”
It did, but not in the form of a consolation victory in the final race. Sutton and the Focus ST, which looks set to be replaced by new machinery by Alliance for 2026, did not have enough TTB to properly pressure the Speedworks Motorsport Toyota Corolla GR Sport of Josh Cook.
After the travails of the Cheshire squad, not to mention the team-hopping Cook, to date in 2025, this was something of an end-of-season statement of intent. The West Countryman, indeed, reckoned he would have had pole position had it not been for a loss of oil pressure that sidelined him from Q1, consigned him to the back of the grid for the start on Sunday, and leading to a new TOCA engine being installed.
Barring further calamity, here was a figure who was always going to be saving the soft tyres up for the finale, with the aim of making it into the reversed-grid mix over the first two races. This he did, although not without some rough racing against team-mate Aron Taylor-Smith that eventually fired the Dubliner out of the running in race two.
Cook started that final race sandwiched between the West Surrey Racing BMW 330i M Sports of poleman Aiden Moffat and outgoing champion Hill, who was waving goodbye to the BTCC before embarking upon an international sportscar career. All of them were on soft tyres, so there was no chance of Cook being able to outdo the rear-wheel-drive machines at the start. Next time around he spectacularly passed Hill, and on the fourth lap he got ahead of Moffat for the lead just before the safety car was called.
A clash between Cammish and Rowbottom cost Alliance Ford the manufacturers’ title, but it was still able to take the teams’ crown
Photo by: JEP
This was because civil war had broken out at Alliance. Rowbottom smacked Cammish onto the grass on the run up Hailwood Hill, and the Berkshire-domiciled Yorkshireman was out of the race. That cost Alliance Ford the manufacturer/constructors title, although consolation came with the teams’ crown.
Sutton had also passed Hill, wasted little time in dispatching Moffat at the restart, and then set off after Cook. But the Toyota now has proper pace, further illustrated by Gordon Shedden (on medium tyres) taking fourth position for the second time that afternoon. On equal boost, Sutton could nibble around 0.2s per lap out of the advantage, but Cook had six laps more in his allocation.
“I knew we had good pace in the car,” related Cook. “We saw that on the mediums even in race one and two. It was about taking risks as well. I knew I had the extra boost so I didn’t need to keep pushing harder and harder. I did have to push all the way, but I could just reserve a little bit and make sure I had the boost at the end when I needed it to stay in front.”
“I’ve put absolutely everything into it this year – physically, mentally. I feel completely drained by it” Tom Ingram
“We just couldn’t overcome the delta he had on boost to us,” reckoned Sutton. “We did the best job we could.”
Although Sutton missed out, there had been a victory earlier in the day for the Alliance team. WSR’s talented youngster Daryl DeLeon had put his BMW on pole for the second round in succession ahead of Cammish and Rowbottom, but there was heartbreak for the Anglo-Filipino when he pulled in at the end of the formation lap with no power. A bent valve meant an engine replacement for race two.
That put Cammish at the front of the grid, and he did the rest by holding off the Excelr8 Hyundais of Tom Chilton (who would suffer alternator failure in both remaining races) and Adam Morgan. That pretty much secured third place in the championship for Cammish from Hill, whose puncture in race one after contact with Morgan wrecked his hopes.
“Just a touring car rub,” summed up Hill. “I can’t blame Adam for it. I’d have done the same thing – just run him out a little bit. It was just unfortunate – it ripped the valve out of the wheel and that was it. Bit of a stinker!” From here, he just ran out of time to catch Cook and Sutton in the finale, but was happy with a podium on his curtain call.
Outgoing champion Hill enjoys a soaking on the podium after his last BTCC race
Photo by: JEP
Cammish, meanwhile, was out of his Ford up at Druids, chatting with spectators. And, on his return to the paddock, said of Rowbottom: “I’m gutted actually. We had a good day, we won a race. The whole reason for going out in that final race was to try and win the teams and manufacturers, and we lost the manufacturers. There was no need to lose it really. I think everyone’s a little bit… disappointed.”
DeLeon, crestfallen earlier, was celebrating a Jack Sears Trophy title that fell back into his hands when his rival – WSR BMW team-mate Charles Rainford – was taken out in a race two clash with Taylor-Smith. Meanwhile, Dan Lloyd just got over the line for a close-fought Independents battle with Restart Racing Hyundai team-mate Chris Smiley and Power Maxed Racing Cupra underdog Mikey Doble.
And then there was Ingram. “It’s been brutal this year,” he sighed as he supped on a Peroni. “I’ve put absolutely everything into it this year – physically, mentally. I feel completely drained by it.” It was worth it.
Ingram celebrates becoming a two-time BTCC champion
Photo by: JEP
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