Ash Sutton: ‘We’ve not given up’

Ash Sutton insists he won’t give up on the chances of claiming this year’s British Touring Car Championship title, even though he failed to reduce the points deficit to Tom Ingram at Silverstone.

Sutton leaves the penultimate weekend of the season with the same 33-point gap to leader Ingram that he had coming into the event, despite scoring a further two podium finishes.

Having qualified just two places ahead of Ingram in 12^th in Saturday afternoon’s session, Sutton then struggled to make progress in the opening race and lost out to Ingram on only the fourth lap of the race.

He was able to keep with his rival to the chequered flag but finished behind the Hyundai in eighth.

The points gap to his rival grew further in race two, when Ingram, on the faster soft tyre, quickly stormed to the front as Sutton made slower progress through the field on the medium compound, eventually following Ingram home in second.

The top 12 were then reversed for the finale, which meant Sutton, now on the faster tyre, had to start on the sixth row. That meant he had to make more progress through the field with the second-least amount of TOCA Turbo Boost [TTB] deployment in the field, by dint of his strong finish in race two, at a circuit where the additional boost has more of an effect.

In the end, despite a faster tyre, Sutton could haul himself up no higher than third, outscoring Ingram by five points to negate his rival’s higher scores earlier in the day.

“I’d love to have pulled the points back any way I could, but it was always going to be a big ask,” said Sutton to TouringCars.Net.

“Due to the shape of the car or engine performance, we’ve not got the straight-line performance that Hyundai has. They’ve got a massive advantage over what we’ve got.

“You saw it in race one – we were both on the [TTB] button and he just cruised straight past me. I can only do so much – I feel like I’ve got one arm behind my back a little bit.

“We’ve not given up, though. You can see that today – we’ve once again played the tyre game differently and made sure we could offset something, and it’s allowed us to pull the points back that we’ve lost.

“There are pros and cons, and I just had to have a bit of belief that we could make the progress on the soft, which we did.

“I wanted to get to the front if I’m brutally honest. We wanted to try and win that race, but the two guys in front had more [TTB] deployment than me and there’s only so much you can do when you’re up against that.

“The deployment effect is so big here that it doesn’t matter what tyre you’re on – if you haven’t got that boost it’s hard to overcome.

“The championship is out of my control now. We could win all three races at Brands Hatch, and it still wouldn’t be enough.

“We’ve got to go there, do the best job we can as a team, try and make a good car out of it in qualifying and get up to the front on race day.

“A little bit of lady luck is definitely required.”