Ash Sutton admits title ‘is a big ask now’

Ash Sutton admitted that ‘it’s a big ask now’ for him to secure the 2025 British Touring Car Championship title, after falling a further 15 points behind title rival Tom Ingram at Donington Park.

Sutton had qualified behind Ingram on Saturday, missing the ‘Quick Six’ part of the session for the third event in a row and putting his Ford in tenth on the grid for the opening race.

The NAPA Racing UK driver then made rapid progress early on in race one and took the chequered flag in fourth, albeit behind Ingram, who was second, to stem the loss of points early in the day.

However, Sutton’s campaign suffered a bigger setback in race two when he was hit by team-mate Daniel Rowbottom whilst fighting for the lead, instead leaving Sutton to limp to an eighth-place finish with a damaged car.

That result was even harder to take given that Sutton once again finished behind Ingram, despite having a tyre advantage over his rival and having hoped to win the race.

The four-time champion was given a small consolation in the grid draw for race three when he was put on pole, but having to run the hard tyre it meant that Sutton would be fighting with less-than-optimum tools at his disposal.

In the end, after a brief door-to-door battle with Ingram in the opening laps, Sutton had to settle for second behind Ingram, seeing the deficit to the Team Vertu driver grow to 32 points with only six races left to run.

“There’s only so much you can do with that tyre deficit in place,” explained Sutton to TouringCars.Net. “I didn’t want to lose too much time and put myself in a position where I was being swallowed up by the other guys, but I also didn’t want to roll over [to Ingram] in race three.

“I wanted to try and at least do something, but I was on borrowed time. He was always going to attack. Once he got alongside us into Turn 1, I made it fair and square and let him have it.

“There was talk of potentially swapping positions and letting Rowbo go after him, but at the time the safety car came out I had a couple more laps of [turbo boost] deployment than Tom did.

“On the first lap we can’t do it, we’ve just got to hang in there, but from that point onwards I just tried to get him with the [turbo] deployment. It was always going to be a big ask, but you have to try something.”

Sutton called the incident with team-mate Rowbottom in race three ‘a racing incident’ and admitted that losing the chance to fight for a win had been hard to take.

“Race two couldn’t have been any further from the plan that we had hoped for. We went out hoping for the race win – that was the idea of finishing fourth in race one.

“It was one of those racing incidents; a small lockup from Dan [Rowbottom] and he went into the back of us and put us out of it. It’s a real shame.

“We were ahead of [Dan] Cammish and he went on to win the race, so it was definitely ours for the taking and it would maybe have made the points a little bit closer than they are.

“When you feel like it’s yours for the win, and everything is on the cards, there’s nothing worse than having that swiped from under your feet.

“It’s one of those racing incidents – it’s not ideal and we’d much rather it had not happened, but it did. He’s going to buy me a beer, hopefully!

“The championship is a big ask now and I need some lady luck. In 2023 it was very much the other way around, when it was me in front and Tom hunting me.

“I think he very much had the same attitude then that he needed a bit of luck for it to fall his way and it’s the same for me this year.

“We need him to have a DNF and for us to win a race and bring it a bit closer, but even that’s not enough as it’s a race and a half realistically now, so its going to be a big ask.”