Tom Ingram showcased his renowned fighting spirit and the raw pace of Ginsters EXCELR8 with TradePriceCars.com’s Hyundai i30N at Thruxton in August, as he battled back from bad luck to remain very much in the mix for the biggest prize in national motorsport.
A top ten finish in the first race at the Hampshire speedbowl was followed by heartbreak in the second bout, as a last lap puncture halted his charge into the top four. He eventually limped home in a frustrating 12th.
Undeterred by the setback, Ingram responded in typical fashion with another gutsy attacking drive to secure fifth in the finale, negating some of the deficit lost from the earlier misfortune.
The fightback drive consolidated the 28-year-old’s second position in both the overall and Independent Drivers’ tables, and whilst his Thruxton travails mean he has conceded some points to championship leader Ash Sutton, he is fully focussed on fighting back at Croft in North Yorkshire on 18/19 September.
Tom Ingram, Ginsters EXCELR8 with TradePriceCars.com, said:
“I love Thruxton, but we knew we were on the back foot going there with the weight we had on-board, and we had to knuckle down to try to extract the most we could from the weekend. We changed the Hyundai quite a lot compared to when we were there back at the start of the season and it felt good, but we just struggled with the ballast in qualifying, to be honest – we’ve gone into the last four events carrying 66kg, and it’s really tough to convert that into a decent grid position in a front-wheel drive car.
“We made a couple more tweaks for Sunday, and race one was all about securing as many points as possible. It felt like a lot of hard work for what we got out of it and I don’t tend to get overly excited about tenth-place finishes, but it was a solid result in the circumstances and put some points on the board without incurring too much damage. The battle with Jason [Plato] was good fun, and fair play to him, he pulled off a cracking move to get past.
“Most importantly, it meant we could remove most of the weight for race two, and the i30N really comes alive in those situations. What then happened at the end was a real kick in the teeth, because we’d pushed hard and done what we needed to do, only to lose it all to the puncture.
“The one thing we needed most of all in race three was laps, and that was the one thing we didn’t get due to the constant safety car interruptions. The Hyundai felt awesome, so it was a shame not to be able to fully exploit that, but ultimately, we still scored good points and took some back from Ash [Sutton], which is what we had to do. It was a positive way to finish the weekend and I was particularly pleased to pinch fifth on the final lap as you never know – that extra point could prove crucial come the end of the season.”
