Tom Ingram says he is looking to capitalise on the struggles of the championship leaders in today’s British Touring Car Championship races at Oulton Park, with the Speedworks driver starting from fourth for race one.
Ingram qualified his Toyota Avensis in fourth for race one, ensuring that the 22-year-old has continually qualified in the top five all season thus far.
However Ingram feels that traffic affected his lap, getting particularly caught up behind BKR’s Mark Howard on his final flying run.
“There’s probably 29 or 30 other drivers on the grid all saying exactly the same thing [about traffic],” said Ingram. “Unfortunately it’s the nature of Oulton Park. There’s not that many places to get past, and also it’s a difficult and tricky circuit with a lot going on.”
Having failed to get on the front row, Ingram has several rear-wheel drive starters around him, which he is aware will create extra challenges ahead of race one.
“We’re going up against rear-wheel drive cars as well, which is going to make it even more difficult. I think Colin [Turkington] can be confident that as long as he gets it off the line that he’s done the business. To be honest, so can Sam [Tordoff, starting third] because both of those rear-wheel drive guys know that they’ll be away at the start.
“Obviously Jason [Plato, starting sixth] is going to be fast off the line as well. But I think they’re probably going into a bit of an unknown as well; they probably don’t actually know how their thing goes off the line because they’ve not really had a chance to do it in a competitive environment.”
Ingram, who has taken a podium in the first race of the weekend in each of the three BTCC meetings in 2016 so far, is all too aware of his inability to string together three solid results over the course of a race weekend, and is looking to make amends this weekend.
“I’m looking at this weekend as being about race two and three,” continued Ingram. “Unfortunately I’ve been saying this every single weekend, that we’ve got to try and string results together, but they never seem to happen.
“Let’s just get race one out of the way, if we get a podium we get a podium and if we get a fifth, we get a fifth. We’ll just take what we get, but focus more on getting it together for race two and race three, and capitalising on Adam [Morgan] and Matt [Neal] and people like that who haven’t had a good qualifying. We need to just try to take as many points away from them as possible.
“As long as we can stay out of trouble I think we should be OK, but unfortunately there’s quite a tight hairpin fairly early on in the lap which always makes it quite entertaining.”