A commanding 35th BTCC career victory lifted Tom Ingram into the series’ all-time top ten winners’ list, after a stellar performance at Oulton Park last weekend (21/22 June).
Ingram arrived at Oulton boasting a stellar recent résumé around the undulating and challenging Cheshire circuit, counting three triumphs, three further podiums and only one finish lower than fourth from his previous nine races there. Right from the outset, he made it very clear he was intent on continuing that trend.
In qualifying, the Team VERTU star advanced comfortably through the opening two phases of the knockout session to book his slot in the ‘Quick Six’ showdown for the fifth time from five attempts in 2025
Ingram proceeded to string together three ‘purple’ sectors on his first effort in Q3 to secure an 11th pole position in the UK’s premier motor racing series by the margin of almost half-a-second – the fastest a BTCC car has ever been driven around Oulton.
In front of the live ITV4 television cameras and a capacity trackside crowd the next day, the 2022 champion made a textbook launch when the starting lights went out in the curtain-raising contest to establish a lead of almost two seconds by the time the safety car was summoned on the second lap to deal with a clash lower down the order.
While that neutralisation erased his advantage, when the action resumed, he immediately set about rebuilding it, going on to cross the line some 5.490 seconds clear of his closest pursuer following a peerless performance for which his 24 high-calibre adversaries had no answer.
A real statement drive – accompanied by a blistering new lap record – Ingram’s lights-to-flag victory elevated him to equal-tenth on the BTCC race-winners’ roll of honour, while simultaneously vaulting him past Ash Sutton to the summit of the championship standings.
After holding sway throughout the first lap – to earn a potentially crucial extra championship point – Ingram inevitably conceded some ground to softer-shod rivals before settling into fourth in race two.
With his set-up initially proving ill-suited to the conditions, from sixth on the partially-reversed grid, by mid-distance, Ingram had slipped to 12th, but a couple of safety car interventions to clear up accidents offered the opportunity for a reset and as the track surface increasingly dried, so the #80 Hyundai i30N came increasingly on-song.
Having recovered to ninth, the EXCELR8 Motorsport racer opportunistically took advantage of two drivers ahead squabbling at the chicane to neatly undercut them both on the exit and climb to seventh. He snatched two more positions on lap 16 before a mistake by Hill promoted him to fourth. After catching the leading trio hand-over-fist, he ultimately fell short of sneaking a spot on the podium by a scant 0.120 seconds, taking the flag less than 1.6 seconds behind the winner.
His impressive turn-of-speed in the closing stages also secured Ingram his second fastest lap of the day, sending him into the BTCC’s annual summer break still sitting second in the overall classification, just ten points adrift of the top of the table with 15 races remaining.
Tom Ingram, Driver, Team VERTU, said:
“Oulton Park is a circuit I love, and I felt in a really good place going into the weekend. The Hyundai was absolutely amazing in qualifying, and I was over-the-moon to take pole – it was simply the most hooked-up car I’ve ever driven, around a circuit where it really isn’t easy to link the whole lap together. The corner speed and momentum we were able to carry, its braking performance and the grip we could generate were something else and when we put new soft tyres on, it was just outrageous.
“Race one was similarly fantastic. You always want a bit of a buffer, and I knew once we had that and had settled into a rhythm, we were in the pound seats because then you can just control the gap as you see fit. My engineer Spencer told me over the radio that Dan [Cammish] had taken fastest lap, so I used some boost to take it back and there didn’t seem to be much drop-off in tyre performance over the duration either.
“I knew Ash [Sutton] was going to come through on the softs in race two – that was inevitable. My aim on the hard tyres was to try to stay somewhere inside the top ten, and fourth far exceeded my expectations – although Jake [Hill] didn’t make my life easy and I was conscious I couldn’t afford to make so much as a single mistake or he would have been past.
“Race three was then very much a story of two halves, and it was a shame the weather played its part. We went very intermediate on the set-up, but it turned out that wasn’t the way to go. The track didn’t dry as quickly as we’d been anticipating, which left us vulnerable early on; when it did begin drying we came back through, but we narrowly ran out of laps to challenge for another podium.
“That was a bit frustrating, but ultimately, the biggest takeaway from the weekend is that this car is honestly unreal – such a joy to drive – and that is full credit to Team VERTU for doing such a cracking job. We’re in a really nice window with the Hyundai at the moment, which is a lovely place to be. Now, we will use the summer break wisely to continue honing and refining it, to ensure we come out all guns blazing and ready to fight tooth-and-nail for the title over the season’s second half!”
