There was no fairytale ending for Tom Ingram in the 2024 Kwik Fit British Touring Car Championship finale at Brands Hatch (5-6 October), but the former champion went down fighting with a heroic performance.
With a dead-heat at the summit of the standings, Ingram headed into the weekend – his eighth consecutive title tilt in the UK’s premier motor racing series – predicting a ‘bare-knuckle fist fight’ for honours.
After pulling a scintillating lap out of the bag in qualifying to line up on the front row of the grid amongst the 20 high-calibre contenders – a scant 0.036 seconds shy of pole position and four spots ahead of chief rival Jake Hill – his challenge suffered an early blow mere moments into the curtain-raising contest in Kent.
As the pack sped towards Druids for the first time, the talented Bucks-born ace found himself collateral damage when the pursuing Josh Cook came together with Ashley Sutton, with the latter in-turn collecting Ingram’s Hyundai i30N.
The 2022 title-winner was able to continue, albeit down in ninth place, from where he dug deep. Belying the equal-lowest hybrid allocation in the field – by dint of his championship position – he scythed back through to third, pulling off some ultra-committed passes in the process and posting fastest lap to secure an additional championship point.
Immediately going on the attack in race two, in front of the live ITV4 television cameras and a capacity trackside crowd, Ingram swept around the outside of Turkington through high-speed Hawthorns. Then exploiting the narrowest of gaps to fire his Hyundai down the inside of Hill into Paddock Hill Bend to seize the initiative at the beginning of lap two, thereafter never looking back.
His 33rd career triumph was inarguably one of his finest, and allied to another fastest lap – his tenth from 30 races this season – the EXCELR8 team leader’s maximum score reduced Hill’s advantage to a single point going into the day’s finale, in the tensest title duel in recent memory.
From seventh on the partially-reversed grid, Ingram initially went on the offensive, snatching sixth from Hill through Paddock Hill Bend for the first time and climbing to fourth on lap two – putting him in a championship-clinching position. He proceeded to zero in on the top three, only for his car’s pace to suddenly fade, and despite battling valiantly for every position, he was powerless to prevent a slide down the order to sixth as Hill overhauled him to seal the spoils.
Tom Ingram, Driver, Team Bristol Street Motors, said: “First of all, enormous credit and huge congratulations to Jake [Hill], MB Motorsport and West Surrey Racing – they’ve had a fabulous season and Jake thoroughly deserves the title. On our side, we’ve done the best job I think we’ve ever done. In the end, we came up just short, which is clearly tough to take, but sometimes it comes down to a bit of luck and fine margins.
“Naturally, we’re disappointed with the end result, but we can’t be disappointed in the slightest with the performance we’ve shown over the course of the season; every single weekend, we’ve rocked up with a car that has felt utterly phenomenal and such a pleasure to drive. We were staggeringly fast in the dry in the first two races at Brands Hatch, and had we not been wiped out at Druids at the start of the day, potentially we could have had two wins and a very different story.
“Everybody at Team Bristol Street Motors has worked so hard, and the car felt really alive and on-the-edge. I was so pumped after winning race two and the Hyundai felt great again on the way to the grid for race three, which gave me a lot of confidence, but for some reason, after the first few laps, we just had no front-end performance. Maybe we picked up some damage on the opening lap, I don’t know.
“We’d done everything we needed to do and were where we needed to be, and then all of a sudden, it was like somebody flicked the ‘off’ switch and that was that. I was three seconds off the pace over the last five laps and an absolute sitting duck, which was massively frustrating so we’ve clearly got some head-scratching to do as to why it went wrong and where we need to improve.
“I was always going to take it down to the wire and under no circumstances was I going to roll over, but ultimately, we simply couldn’t extract any more out of it. It’s really disappointing to lose right at the end, but to lose like that when you can’t even fight is doubly disappointing.
“Still, I can’t be anything but incredibly proud of what we’ve achieved here at Team Bristol Street Motors – we’ve had an amazing season. Sometimes, it doesn’t go your way, but we’ll just have to make sure we return even stronger in 2025 so we can take the title back...”
