Well, that wasn’t predicted… The British Touring Car Championship experienced one of those weekends at Snetterton where its acknowledged title-winning Big Three – Ash Sutton, Tom Ingram, Jake Hill – all failed to win a race, and each suffered a setback. That threw the door open to victories for Dan Cammish, Dan Rowbottom and Mikey Doble, the last-named in particular eliciting an explosion of joy from down the ‘unfashionable’ end of the pitlane.
Yet the highest points scorer across the three races was Sutton, always maximising, constantly making the most of whatever he was faced with. And now the four-time champion has expanded his points cushion over Ingram from five points to 15 in his quest for a fifth title. Hill has faded to 40 adrift, although is still in third place.
Let’s deal with Hill first. It is now well-chronicled that the West Surrey Racing team was faced with a pace deficit with its BMW 330i M Sport at the Donington Park opener, thanks to the removal of hybrid for 2025 – and the lightening of the cars due to this – proving difficult in terms of ballast placement and the car’s handling. For round two at Brands Hatch Indy there was what has become universally labelled as the ‘perfect storm’ for the rear-wheel-drive machine of hot weather, soft tyres, brand-new Tarmac at the most important corner on the circuit, and a surfeit of TOCA Turbo Boost owing to that disappointing opening weekend. And, of course, there had been plenty of burning of midnight oil down Sunbury way.
OPINION: The struggles facing Hill and West Surrey Racing in BTCC 2025
At Snetterton, it was whatever you call the opposite of ‘perfect storm’ – certainly not ‘perfect calm’. Cool conditions (apart from the wet FP1, in which the BMWs flew), long straights, and Hill on third-in-championship five seconds per lap of TTB.
“It’s slightly different to Donington in the sense that the car actually feels really good to drive,” related reigning champion Hill after qualifying a dismal 20th, “whereas at Donington it felt pretty horrendous. So we have made a step forward in terms of car feeling, and general lateral performance I think is quite good. But we just have nothing in a straight line. I’ve said this from the start – we are very, very down and that contributed to Donington, and then at Brands the only thing that saved us was the fact we had immense traction out of Clearways due to the new Tarmac. At Brands we were by far the best car at Clearways, yet we were still 3mph down at the line compared to a certain team [the Ingram-led Excelr8 Motorsport Hyundai squad], so figure that one out. We were just lucky at Brands.”
At least Charles Rainford, fresh off his maiden win at Brands, second time out in his rookie season, planted his BMW into Q2. But it was an uphill struggle in the flatlands of East Anglia for the whole team. “The one thing we can take from it is we’ve clearly made steps forward with the chassis because we all love it,” continued Hill. “I’ve had podiums here every year the past three years and this is arguably the best chassis I’ve ever had here, yet it’s my worst qualifying ever in a BMW by a long way.”
Hill (l) was back down to earth after Brands success, with his BMW mired in the midfield
Photo by: JEP
Could things possibly get any worse? Yes… Naturally, Hill elected to run the hard tyre in race one, with the aim to progress on the soft Goodyear from then on. But he was clattered into by Aron Taylor-Smith, who had been edged towards the grass in his battle with Speedworks Toyota team-mate Gordon Shedden, crippling the left-rear toelink on the BMW. In race two, all but the top three from the opener (the hard tyre mandated in their case) were on the soft rubber, and Hill clambered to 11th, but on this occasion there was no luck with the reversed-grid draw. Then he was ninth in the finale, relegated post-race from eighth on the road for contact with another Toyota driver, in this case Ronan Pearson.
So we were down to a ‘Big Two’ for this weekend, but electrical issues struck the Alliance Racing Ford Focus ST of points leader Sutton (who retained the popular 100th anniversary livery this weekend for title sponsor NAPA) during FP2, Q2 and Q3. This left him sixth on the grid. “They fixed the problem from FP2 and I think there was just a knock-on effect, just one of those horrible little gremlins that made an appearance,” rued Sutton.
But the pace when the car was running was fantastic, certainly an improvement on Brands. In Q1, Sutton pipped Ingram by just 0.002 seconds, the duo on one and three seconds respectively of TTB. The next best in their group was over 0.3s adrift. How on earth do they do it? In the end, Ingram lost out in the Quick Six shootout by a mere 0.030s to Cammish, although the Berkshire-domiciled Yorkshireman’s Focus enjoyed 13s of TTB.
“Genuinely that car over there has been remarkable, utterly, utterly stunning,” gushed Ingram as he stood by the Excelr8 truck, pointing happily at his Hyundai. “There’s not even a hint of the merest criticism I’ve got. Phenomenal. The grip is outrageous. It’s perfect. When you’ve got a car like that, you should be able to make up the deficit a bit more.”
“Hands up. Completely my fault. I just went in a bit too fast, and lost the rear early. It got to that point where it went right to the lock stops and it just never ever ever came back” Tom Ingram
“A 1m53s in a touring car around here is going some, isn’t it?” pondered Cammish. “The thing is I can do it with boost and Ingram without, which is kind of shocking, but I drive what’s under me.” For him, though, here was some redemption after his race-costing miscue at Brands, where he accidentally switched off the engine behind the safety car: “I’ve got an amazing team behind me, they give me a great car, and the support as well… They had every right to be pissed off, but they’ve been nothing but supportive, genuinely behind me all the way. If anything they’ve been killing me with kindness.”
Arguably more impressive than Cammish’s pole was his victory in race one. Admittedly, his seven laps of TTB allowed him to deploy to manage the gap to Ingram (on two) and Sutton (one), who had gained three places from his grid spot to move into third by the second corner of the race. But he was able to extend the gap from 2.7s to 4.3s on the final tour as the two champions squabbled in his mirrors.
“The boost is quite powerful as we know,” admitted Cammish. “We used it smartly. I could let them come to a point, but I could always extend when I needed to. The team obviously coached me through that and made sure I was in a good place, the car was great. Nice to get it on the board.”
Cammish was able to successfully convert pole into his first victory of the season
Photo by: JEP
Sutton tried to charge his way into second at the tight Agostini left-hander on the final lap, but backed out after contact to let Ingram have the place. “I just had to do the right thing and give that place back,” he explained. “If I’d made the apex, it was a fair move, but I’d just skipped past it.” Ingram, in turn, had been nursing overheating brakes: “I don’t know if we lost some ducting, but I was weak in all the braking zones.”
Further back, Rowbottom drove his Alliance Ford into fourth place ahead of the Restart Racing Hyundai of Dan Lloyd, each of them passing Adam Morgan in his Excelr8 Hyundai during the race. And, with the leading trio forced onto hard tyres for race two, these three were looking good to fight out the win.
Cammish sank like a stone on his hards from the start, while Sutton got ahead of Ingram. And then came the setback for the 2022 champion. Ingram had Rowbottom hard on his heels through Riches on the third lap when suddenly the Hyundai got into a massive slide, speared across the track and smacked into the inside barrier, causing race-ending damage to the right-rear toelink.
Contact from Rowbottom? No. “I cocked up,” proclaimed Ingram. “Hands up. Completely my fault. I just went in a bit too fast, and lost the rear early. It got to that point where it went right to the lock stops and it just never ever ever came back. It’s the first time I’ve ever spun and hit a wall.”
While Sutton fell to 10th on his hard rubber, Rowbottom got the better of a mid-race sparring match with Lloyd to join Cammish in breaking his season duck for 2025. The bearded Midlander was driving a car he was happy with for the first time this season after engineer Paul Ridgway “has thrown the kitchen sink at it. For the first time we’ve moved the car in a window that I like. That said, Cammo’s on the old philosophy and he pulled out a great time.”
Lloyd led for a few corners, meaning Rowbottom “had to deploy [TTB] a lap earlier than I wanted to, so we used it on a lap which meant I was vulnerable to Adam at the end.” Morgan, indeed, came a hair’s breadth from claiming his first win of the campaign, while Lloyd fell to fourth behind Tom Chilton’s Excelr8 Hyundai and only just held off Restart team-mate Chris Smiley.
Set-up work behind the scenes from engineer Ridgway paid dividends for Rowbottom
Photo by: JEP
Could Lloyd have held on once in the lead? “In hindsight I should have used the boost to keep in front, because I knew the guys behind me had more boost,” he admitted. “So, in an ideal world, he would have been the one defending from them and given me some space. If I’m completely honest with myself, I think it’s a little bit of rust in those situations.”
Sixth was the Power Maxed Racing Vauxhall Astra of Doble, who had somehow escaped a scary snafu at the esses mid-race with the Alliance Ford of Sam Osborne in which he shot out of control across the escape road and the grass. The Surrey man had surprisingly got his pain on hard tyres out of the way in race one, despite qualifying fourth. He had finished ninth in that one, with a best lap time on a par with those recorded later by Sutton and Ingram on the same rubber. Now he was at the front of the reversed grid on softs for the finale, with the next five behind on hards…
Predictably, Sutton moved through to challenge, after escaping some early rough-and-tumble with Rainford and the One Motorsport Honda Civic Type R of Josh Cook.
“I got ‘Rainforded’ I would say. We had a little bit of damage on the right rear and I wore the fronts out trying to chase Doble at the end. I just snatched the brakes a little bit and overshot the corner” Ash Sutton
Sutton had more TTB than Doble who, with four laps remaining, breathed in and took his last lap without any boost assistance, allowing the Ford onto the Vauxhall’s bumper. And then he managed it perfectly: “Everyone raised question marks over our choice of hard tyre in race one, and it was all for that moment there. I played the long game.”
How did Doble cope with Sutton’s pressure? “With great difficulty! I thought, ‘Well, I’ve got four laps to go, four laps of boost, so I’m going to give it everything here and what will be will be.’”
Sutton’s run wide at the hairpin on the penultimate lap consigned him to second, ahead of Cook. “I got ‘Rainforded’ I would say,” he recounted. “We had a little bit of damage on the right rear and I wore the fronts out trying to chase Doble at the end. I just snatched the brakes a little bit and overshot the corner.”
And so ended our unpredicted weekend. Unpredicted, that is, in all senses bar Sutton bagging a big haul of points. “Despite Tom having an off [in race two], we most likely were going to beat him in that race – we seemed to be stronger at the start,” he reckoned. “What would have happened in race three we don’t know, but we’re stretching that gap.”
While Doble denied Sutton a win, he didn’t prevent the four-time champion extending his points lead
Photo by: JEP
In this article
Marcus Simmons
BTCC
Ashley Sutton
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