Tom Ingram admits that things ‘could have been worse’ after the Speedworks driver endured his worst British Touring Car Championship weekend to-date at Oulton Park, picking up just one point from the weekend’s action.
Having struggled with 75 kg of success ballast on board for heading into the meeting leading the drivers’ championship, Ingram missed out on the top ten and could only put his Toyota in 11th in qualifying on Saturday.
That left Ingram at the mercy of others in the pack for race one, and Ingram came off worse for wear when Jack Goff made contact with his car when Ingram himself was unsighted due to losing a wing mirror.
From the back of the pack in race two, Ingram struggled to make progress around the hard-to-pass Oulton Park circuit, before being contacted by Team HARD’s Will Burns and retiring from the race.
Yet more contact followed in race three, again from the back of the pack, and Ingram was left to salvage a solitary point for the fastest lap of the race.
“We scored one point, so it’s not that bad,” said a nonchalant Ingram to TouringCars.Net after the races. “It could have been a lot worse. It goes to show how well we did at the start of the year, that we’ve had that weekend and still be in the mix.
“It’s alright, we’ll come back at Croft and it will be fine. There’s no reason that we can’t get some similar [points] back.”
Ingram added that dropping to third in the championship standings should help him out at the next round, where he will carry a slightly reduced 57 kg of ballast.
“We’ve lost a little bit of weight out of the car, which will be nice. We should be OK at Croft – we went really well there last year.
“It’s just going to be a case of trying to recover a little bit from this weekend and try to pick something up if we can.
“Up until this weekend we’ve only had one race finish outside the top five, so we were there and it shows what one bad weekend can do.”