How Sutton nullified Ingram’s BTCC pace superiority at Oulton Park

If Ash Sutton claims a record-breaking fifth British Touring Car Championship title this October, he may well look back on a weekend in June when he outscored main rival Tom Ingram because his pace was so inferior as key to that success.

That may sound paradoxical, but it’s absolutely true. Scarcely in the NGTC era has any driver-car combination been so dominant as Ingram and his Excelr8 Motorsport Hyundai i30 N Fastback were at Oulton Park. Sutton, by contrast, was in the ‘there or thereabouts’ league with his Alliance Racing-run NAPA Ford Focus ST, which allowed him to pull a fast one in the opening race to drop off the podium, sail to victory in race two because he could use the soft Goodyear tyres again, and then avoid using the hard compound altogether because the forecasted rain arrived in time for the finale.

Ingram’s superiority was so emphatic that such jiggery-pokery with the sporting regulations was, for him, not an option. Somehow, after his storming run to victory in the opener, he managed an astonishing fourth place on the hard rubber in race two. But fourth in the third encounter, after a set-up gamble that was perhaps a couple of laps from being played to perfection, to the second of Sutton meant a net loss of one point over the weekend, the 2022 champion’s deficit widening from nine to 10.

“I think you’re probably right,” was Ingram’s response when questioned whether the negative end result was the product of his overperforming relative to the rest of the field. And “definitely not” was his reply when it was put to him that this left it impossible to try what Sutton described as his “good game of chess, as some people would say”.

The competitive landscape had become clear when jaws dropped during the top-six Q3 qualifying shootout. Ingram, with access to just three seconds per lap of TOCA Turbo Boost, steamed around the verdant Cheshire countryside almost half a second quicker than closest rival Chris Smiley. Just over two tenths covered Smiley back to Adam Morgan in sixth…

While Ingram had looked strong through Q1 and Q2, there had been no hint of the crushingly demoralising (for everyone else) performance to come. “Q1 felt really good, Q2 I was happy just to get through and into the final stage really and not to do track limits, not cause a red flag; with the rain starting to come down [there was a brief shower] it was slightly nervy,” he explained. “I was maybe overly cautious.

“But the car in that final qualifying session was out-of-this-world good. It had absolutely limitless grip, just unbelievable, and I could put the car wherever I wanted to, brake as late as I want to, get the power on as early as I wanted.” It had left everybody else scratching their heads: “Good! That’s what we like to hear. Honestly, it was just really hooked up.”

Sutton, meanwhile, was in fourth place, separated from Ingram by Smiley (on the full 15s of TTB) and his own team-mate Dan Cammish (7s), and a yawning chasm of 0.550s to the polesitter. On one second of TTB as the championship leader, that was a thoroughly praiseworthy performance – if you remove Ingram from the context.

“How they’ve gone and done that – full credit to them, I’ve got huge respect for someone who can go and do that time, but we’ve not got four tenths in our back pocket, I know that much,” summed up Sutton. “How they suddenly made that jump from Q1 and Q2 and then into Q3 is beyond me. But credit where credit’s due.

“We’ve not changed a huge amount throughout the day. Car balance was OK for qualifying. Could it have been better? Maybe. But not the jump we’d have needed to be up with Tom. We’re talking a tenth or so.”

While Ingram went on his merry way to victory – and the traditional showering of his Hyundai with enthusiastic adjectives – both Cammish and Sutton got past Smiley’s Restart Racing Hyundai in the opening corners. But then, on the run to the Hislop’s chicane on the final lap, Sutton gave third place back

So it was time for Sutton and engineer Antonio Carrozza – as creative a combo as you will find in motorsport – to hatch a little plan. Such is the laptime delta between the soft tyre, which each driver had to use for two races last Sunday, and the hard ‘option’ rubber, team-mate Cammish had already predicted after the May Snetterton round that a deliberate dropping off the podium in race one might be on the cards at the two remaining events where these two compounds are mandatory: Oulton Park and Croft. That’s because among the tweaks to the sporting regulations for 2025 was a reduction from the top 10 in race one to the top three being forced to use the hardest available rubber remaining from their allocation for race two.

While Ingram went on his merry way to victory – and the traditional showering of his Hyundai with enthusiastic adjectives – both Cammish and Sutton got past Smiley’s Restart Racing Hyundai in the opening corners. But then, on the run to the Hislop’s chicane on the final lap, Sutton gave third place back to the Northern Irishman.

The compulsory usage of hard tyres in race two obviously did for Smiley and Cammish, but Ingram? Not so much…

Sutton handed third to Smiley in the opener but reaped the strategic benefits in the following two races

Photo by: JEP

Sutton picked his way through and grabbed the lead with a dive on Ingram at the hairpin on the second lap. After they muscled through the turn, Ingram ran wide on the exit and conceded the runner-up spot to the sister Excelr8 Hyundai of Morgan down into Hislop’s. Next time around, it was another team-mate in the form of Tom Chilton who went past. And then along came Jake Hill.

The reigning BTCC champion felt after qualifying that some progress is being made in the West Surrey Racing BMW camp after its torrid opening events (save for the weekend tour de force at Brands Hatch). He didn’t make it to Q2, but his 3-Series had been drawn in by far the tougher group and would easily have progressed from the other (as did rookie team-mate Charles Rainford, with a slower time than Hill’s). “We’ve probably got a top-eight paced car, which is better than we’ve had for the last couple of rounds,” professed Hill. “But having said that, it’s still pretty slow.”

From 13th on the grid, Hill moved up nicely in race one and fell just 0.014s short of nabbing sixth place from Morgan as he drew alongside at the finish line. And now, in the sequel, he was on seven laps of TTB plus soft tyres, versus one lap of TTB and hard rubber for Ingram. Surely he would get past pretty quickly.

“I had to be fairly stern with my defence to be honest,” admitted Ingram of somehow fending off the BMW throughout. “He wasn’t making my life easy.” It was as graphic an illustration as you can get of the relative lack of straight-line speed of the 3-Series and the strength in that department of the Hyundai. “It’s just embarrassing,” lamented Hill. “I’m literally sat in the car waving him goodbye in a straight line. We’re told that it’s 50 to 60bhp when you engage extra boost, and that’s what I needed to keep up with him when he’s not on it. The car felt great – no complaints about the chassis. I just have sod all [straight-line speed] compared to them. Oulton exaggerates it because it’s quite hilly, but in sector one [up to the Lakeside straight] we’re in the top five all the time because there are no real pulls.”

For his part, the rejuvenated Morgan kept Chilton at bay and never relented in his pursuit of winner Sutton. “That was the main thing,” he smiled. “We kept him honest for a bit.” But things would go pear-shaped for both of the Excelr8 Hyundai veterans in the wet of race three, Morgan having a toe link broken as a result of a whack from an unknown assailant, and Chilton crawling back to the pits on muscle memory when his bonnet flipped up after he’d tipped Mikey Doble’s Power Maxed Racing Vauxhall into the barriers at Hislop’s, for which he was apologetic.

That also caused a second safety car of the race, something that would impact the chances of many other competitors. As had the rain…

As race two winner, it would normally have been Sutton’s duty to do the honours with veteran ITV presenter Steve Rider’s selection of balls for the reversed grid draw. But the mid-season retirement of Rider, a man who has done so much since the 1980s to popularise the BTCC, meant a spontaneous decision by Sutton to grab the anchor man’s mic and get him to do it instead on his swansong day. The impossible-to-ruffle Rider duly pulled out number nine. That put Gordon Shedden on pole, and the Scottish three-time champion had already used his hard tyres in race one. It was a similar story for Sutton’s team-mate Dan Rowbottom, fourth on the grid and with a nice set of soft rubber available to bid for a third successive reversed-grid win.

The BTCC bid farewell to Rider as TV frontman

Photo by: JEP

But then it rained. Sutton’s podium-conceding gamble in race one had paid off. “It’s a big risk to do it,” he acknowledged. “You’re gambling on God to some extent with the weather! It’s a risk that paid off today. How many times we play it I don’t know. I’m glad it’s worked in our favour.”

It did, and Sutton claimed second place behind Shedden, who never put a wheel wrong in his Toyota Corolla GR Sport to claim a morale-boosting victory for the Speedworks Motorsport-run Toyota Gazoo Racing UK team. He had been coming under pressure from Hill, who had a great first lap from fifth on the grid. “The Beemer in the wet as we know it was back with a vengeance,” reckoned the diminutive Kentishman. “I was loving it – everything was good.”

But then “the two safety cars completely screwed us. It dried so much in the second that the front-wheel-drive cars came alive and it was a real struggle”. At Cascades on the penultimate lap, Hill “braked in the normal place, but the rears under-rotated, I had a big old slide and that was that.” He dived for the Fosters circuit cut-through, before bouncing across the grass and back onto the Lakeside straight to finish seventh. That promoted Sutton to second, but without enough time to cut the deficit to Shedden.

“It seems a shame that we’ve had such a strong weekend and somehow lost points to Ash. It’s just really frustrating” Tom Ingram

The safety car also affected Ingram, who had slumped to ninth by the second caution but, within four laps of the restart, was bang on third-placed Rowbottom’s tail as they started the final tour. The bearded Midlander held him off, but Ingram did grab the bonus point for fastest lap – after Dexter Patterson, who fitted slicks at the second safety car, was excluded for failing the ride-height check.

“We went down the route of getting the car ready for the end of the race, when it was going to be drying,” explained Ingram. “We could see what was coming, so we said, ‘Let’s go super-intermediate and get the value when it starts to dry out.’ But unfortunately it took too many laps to come back to us and, with the second safety car then knocking laps off the race distance, that’s ultimately what nobbled us. Otherwise I can’t see any reason why we wouldn’t have won that race. But we live and learn.

“Spencer [Aldridge, Ingram’s engineer] and I were talking earlier on that it seems a shame that we’ve had such a strong weekend and somehow lost points to Ash. It’s just really frustrating. I feel utterly exhausted after today, to be honest with you. It’s been a bit of a bruiser, this one.”

At the halfway stage in the 2025 BTCC season, Ingram has a 10-point deficit to bridge to Sutton

Photo by: JEP