Tom Ingram admits consistently improved results have altered his focus heading into each British Touring Car Championship weekend as he targets strategic points, rather than going all-out to impress.
The Speedworks driver currently holds a 14-point advantage over double champion Colin Turkington in the standings after the triple header at Donington Park.
Ingram also claimed his fourth career victory in the middle race, made all the more impressive considering the Toyota Avensis was carrying 39 kilograms of success ballast at the time from his fifth-placed starting slot.
Having remained loyal to Christian Dick’s independent outfit over the last four seasons despite attractive offers elsewhere, Ingram’s camp have intelligently investing an increasing budget to haul themselves into championship contention.
The 23-year old says that his pre-weekend preparation is now about engineering the highest points total possible, rather than bridging a performance gap to the main championship players, such as Team Dynamics, BMW, Motorbase or Team BMR.
“We’ve won four races – it’s incredible to see that and remarkable that instead of trying, weekend on weekend, to impress, we’re now going into it looking at a weekend as ‘what are we going to do points-wise, how are we going to score points and go about doing it?” Ingram explained to TouringCars.net. “It’s impressive to see how far we’ve come, I’m hugely proud of it so far.”
The Ginetta Junior and GT4 Supercup winner also agreed his philosophy is comparable to that of Sam Tordoff, last season’s runner-up.
Tordoff, now racing in the British GT Championship, had maintained a mantra of steady, consistent points scoring and narrowly missed out on the title by two points at the final race last year.
Ingram also maintained that it is too early in the season to seriously consider himself a contender for championship honours.
“We seem to be doing okay so far with picking up points. We know that looking at anything championship-related [at present] is foolish because there’s so far to go, I’m not even nearly considering it.
“There’s so much that can happen over the course of a year.
“Yes, of course we’re going to be trying hard for the rest of it to try and get there, but we’ll just keep plugging away.”
Ingram will join the majority of the BTCC teams in testing at Thruxton this coming Thursday [20th April].