Tom Ingram says he is ‘more than happy’ with qualifying in seventh for the first British Touring Car Championship race at Brands Hatch, even though he is behind Independents’ title rival Jack Goff.
The Speedworks driver had been briefly fastest in a rain-affected and incident-interrupted qualifying session on Saturday, before he slipped down the times as the session neared its conclusion.
With no further improvement in lap times coming from Ingram, he ended up in seventh at the end, in a position which the Speedworks star was not disappointed with.
“I’m more than happy with that,” said Ingram to TouringCars.Net. “We know that we’re carrying quite a bit of weight, and we know that there’s still quite a bit of time in the car that we just need to get our head around, but I think we’re fairly confident that we know what it is.
“It was a bit of a mixed session. Obviously, the rain at the start played a little bit of a havoc for everyone, because all of a sudden, the plan got thrown into chaos.”
Crucially for Ingram he starts race one nine places ahead of Honda’s Gordon Shedden, who is just one point ahead in the overall drivers’ championship standings. Additionally, Ingram also hopes to minimise the points loss to pole-sitter Jack Goff in the Independents’ standings, where he is 31 points ahead of the Eurotech Racing driver.
“I’m pleased that we’re ahead of Shedden, although obviously we’d like to be closer to Jack,” added Ingram, “But Jack seems to have that thing really hooked up around here, so he doesn’t seem like he’s going to be too troubled by anyone; I tried to drop in behind him and follow him earlier, and his car just looked like it was on rails.
“I’d like to have got past Gordon [in the championship] after the first race if possible, because although he’s a little further down he’s not out of it, and we know that Gordon will come through.
“I’m targeting a strong race finish inside the top three in the Independents’ to try and minimise the loss to Jack. We’ll try and take some points off Gordon in race one if we can, and we’ll see what happens.”