Tom Ingram was pleased with his weekend in the British Touring Car Championship at Snetterton, as the Speedworks Motorsport driver took home two third places to move into the championship lead.
After an alternator failure in the first race threatened to put a damper on the Toyota racer’s weekend, Ingram fought back in impressive style in race two to make up 24 places to finish third.
He then took another podium in the ballast-free double distance final race of the weekend behind Matt Neal and Jack Goff, giving the 24-year-old the championship lead for the first time since the first race at Thruxton, with a six-point advantage over BMW’s Colin Turkington.
“It’s not much, but coming into the weekend I don’t think we necessarily expected to close the gap and take the lead off Colin, so I’m well pleased with that actually,” said Ingram to TouringCars.Net. “I’m really, really pleased. It’s been a really good weekend.”
“Obviously we’ll choose to forget about the first race. Otherwise, I think we’d have had three very, very strong races, as Jack would have as well.
“The third race then was just all about points consolidation. I saw Ash [Sutton] had got a drive-through penalty, and just thought that it was even more of a reason not to take a risk.
“I knew Colin wasn’t on my bumper as well, so again that was another reason not to take a risk. It was all just playing the chess game and taking points.”
Although Ingram did make a late-race attempt to pass Goff for second, he admitted that he did not try too hard to force the issue, hoping instead that Goff would make a mistake to give him the opportunity to pass.
“I’d saved my tyres, and so with three laps to go I thought ‘fuck it’ and I switched my lights on and started to hassle him to see if I could make it past.
“I had no intention to go past, because it was too risky. The only reason I did what I did was to put him under pressure and try and force him into a mistake to get past. That was the mindset behind it all.”
Looking back on his weekend Ingram was pleased to have moved back to the top of the table, with his ballast heading to the next meeting at Rockingham only increasing by 9 kg to 75 kg.
“It’s going to be hard, but you’d argue coming here with 66 kg was going to be hard, and we’ve done alright. Of course it’s going to be hard, but that’s the penalty that we take for being at the front.
“We’re in a better place now. We know how to get a little bit more out of the car with weight, so all things considered we’ve got strong pace.”
“All things considered, it’s been a good weekend.”