Tom Ingram believes he scored the maximum points haul possible in the British Touring Car Championship races at Knockhill, with the Speedworks driver among the best front-wheel drive entrants in all three races.
Aside from race two, where Ingram ended up as the third-best front-wheel drive car, the 23-year-old was the fastest of the FWD entrants in Sunday’s races.
Race two saw him lose out to both Gordon Shedden and Dave Newsham in the early stages of the race before going on to take the chequered flag in eighth, giving the Speedworks driver a prime third place starting position for race three.
In race three Ingram put in a dominant display to claim his third win of the season, at one stage having a nine-second lead before two safety car periods made him work for victory.
“I knew at the restart that I just had to make the initial jump over Gordon, because as soon as I had that I knew I was out of lunging distance,” explained Ingram of the latter stages of the race.
“There’s a few things you don’t want and it’s Gordon in your mirror around Knockhill, so it was good that we had the pace.
“It made the restart relatively easy for me, because I knew I had the pace to then ‘gap’ him.”
“The plan for this weekend was to score as many points as possible and if any opportunity came to grab a podium I was going to grab it with both hands and it’s worked out perfectly.
“I don’t think we could have done anything better, certainly in the first race and potentially in the second. We’ve scored the most that we could this weekend and I don’t think we’ve had any better opportunity to do it.”
Looking at the championship challenge, Ingram admits that he has an outside chance now that he is 61 points adrift, but points to the next three circuits as being ones where he expects to be strong.
“Realistically it’s a big gap to try and find,” added Ingram. “Whilst the next circuits that we go to don’t necessarily suit the front-wheel drive cars, they also don’t favour the rear-wheel drive cars, so potentially we might be able to claw some back at the next few races.
“The pace of the Subaru has been ridiculous to match this weekend. In race one I was up against James Cole and he drove past me like driving past your Nan, so it was very, very easy.
“Hopefully we can start to claw it back, but we’ve just got to stay consistent and keep scoring points, even if that’s an incredibly boring thing to say.”