How Sutton succeeded as BTCC tyre theory became inverted

Two wins, a third, and an early championship lead for Ash Sutton. Has the British Touring Car Championship reverted to 2023 form during its opening weekend of the season at Donington Park. No, because Tom Ingram looks every bit Sutton’s equal, and the chirpy champ of 2022 emerged with no wins, but three seconds. Are we back to 2024 then? Er, no, because reigning title holder Jake Hill is struggling.

Thankfully for the BTCC faithful who flocked to the East Midlands venue, the weather also bore no relation to the misery endured last year – or most other trips here, come to think of it. This had its own impact, because series organiser TOCA and tyre supplier Goodyear had been emboldened to use the soft compound as the weekend’s option rubber, rather than the traditional medium-all-the-way format. With ambient temperatures nudging above 20C and the track considerably warmer than that, the teams were faced with the unusual situation whereby the medium tyre – mandated for two races for each competitor – was actually preferable to the soft.

The first obvious sign of this was the exit from contention in race one of Dan Cammish with a puncture on his left-front soft tyre. This was a return to Donington disaster – in recent years he has suffered a fire and a car-destroying brake failure here – for the Berkshire-domiciled Yorkshireman, who had stolen bragging rights over team-mate Sutton on Saturday. BTCC round one qualifying, with no success penalties in place regarding allocation of the TOCA Turbo Boost ‘push-to-pass’, is the purest competition you will ever see in the series, and it was the Alliance Racing-run NAPA Ford Focus ST of Cammish that pipped the sister car of Sutton plus Ingram’s Excelr8 Motorsport Hyundai i30 N Fastback to pole position.

Sutton felt he had mitigating circumstances in missing out by a mere 0.011 seconds. “I left a little bit on the table – probably one and a half to two tenths,” he theorised. “I messed up McLeans on my good lap, that killed my minimum speed and halted the momentum.”

Ingram, too, felt that a mid-Q3 red flag, ironically caused by team-mate Tom Chilton coasting to a halt on the exit of Redgate with crank sensor failure, had spoiled his chances; the lead Hyundai fell just 0.031s short of Cammish. “We felt totally out of sync with everything in Q3,” he professed. “The red flag kind of scuppered us, and it just didn’t work after that. It took me two attempts to have a go at a lap, and it just didn’t feel connected unfortunately. And when I’ve come across the line with a minute to go and I haven’t actually got a lap time in yet, in your head you’re going, ‘I can’t make a mistake and I can’t get track limits’, so you’ll always be slightly this side of the line as well.”

Yet for all this, Cammish was another who could have gone quicker…

Another story of the day was TOCA’s reinstallation of tyre bundles at the chicane after flagrant abuse throughout the field of track limits – which were being monitored by new TOCA-funded TV-quality cameras – during free practice. Ingram’s time from FP1 remained comfortably the quickest set all weekend by anyone, and the Coventry resident muttered: “It’s a totally different circuit. It’s like we’ve decided out of nowhere that suddenly sticking massive tyre stacks in is a sensible thing to do.”

What was noticeable was that Cammish was taking a wider, squarer entry into the chicane during free practice than his kerb-diving comrades, so potentially the reinstatement of the tyres disadvantaged him less. But his track-limits issue was on corner exits, specifically out of the chicane and onto the start-finish straight, where any infringement was punished not only with deletion of the lap the driver was on, but the following one too. “And then on the last lap I’ve finally driven a nice clean lap and done a good job and got it to the line and pole,” he sighed. “I would never have guessed I’d done it in Turn 10 [chicane exit] – I don’t even think the exit of Turn 10’s been a problem.”

Compounding this was that Cammish had a malfunctioning radio, so it was one-way traffic from him to engineer James Mundy: “I’ve had problems all day with comms. They can hear me but I can’t hear them almost at all, other than when I’m stationary in the pitlane.” Indeed, it was only when he got back to the pits that he discovered he had taken pole.

So, with Cammish and Sutton on the front row, the logical choice for the NAPA crews was to make hay while the sun literally shone and start race one on the soft tyres. Sutton’s cutback move on the exit of Redgate surged him past Cammish, but almost immediately there were concerns over the rubber.

“A culture shock, that’s what that was!” exclaimed Sutton. “I was expecting much more from a soft tyre, but it’s the first time we’ve used them here for God knows how long. It caught me by surprise.”

“Those last few laps with Tom giving me the hurry-up, it gave the tyre a hard time. Whether it would have survived any more laps I don’t know” Ash Sutton

Both he and Cammish were in nursing mode, and it was not long after ‘DanCam’ had conceded second place to Ingram that the puncture struck. “I don’t really know why, and obviously Ash got to the end – but you could see the cords on Ash’s,” he related. “We had a much more conservative set-up than Ash, so I’m surprised mine meant went earlier than Ash, considering how much I babied them. Maybe I was just a bit unlucky.”

Luckily for Cammish, Adam Morgan had just stopped out on circuit – also with a puncture – and the safety car enabled the Ford to have a new tyre bolted on in the pits and emerge still on the lead lap albeit at the back of the field, in 19th position.

Cammish sliced his way up to ninth during the remaining six laps, including two places snatched at the finish line in a three-wide photo finish with Aiden Moffat and Chris Smiley. And he was promoted to eighth when a 10-second false-start penalty for Ronan Pearson, the only driver other than Sutton and Cammish to start this race on softs, dumped the young Scot from fifth to 13th after a promising first race with the Speedworks Motorsport-run Toyota Gazoo Racing squad.

Sutton kept his softs alive to triumph in the opener

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

That safety car had also arguably aided Cammish’s stablemate Sutton in keeping the medium-shod Hyundai of Ingram at bay. “With how my car was in that race, the safety car saved Ash,” mused Ingram, while Sutton admitted: “Those last few laps with Tom giving me the hurry-up, it gave the tyre a hard time. Whether it would have survived any more laps I don’t know. With the [turbo] boost at the end we were able to hold our own, but it was close.”

Cammish’s exit promoted another Alliance Ford, that of Dan Rowbottom, to the podium, and the bearded Midlander joined Sutton and Ingram in being compelled by the sporting regulations to use the hardest tyre – ie the medium – in race two. Hill had made good progress in race one to rise from eighth to fourth at the wheel of his West Surrey Racing-run BMW 330i M Sport. The diminutive Kentishman now went for softs, as did Josh Cook, pegged back to seventh in race one by a punt from Chilton that not only knocked him briefly off track, but folded over the exhaust of his One Motorsport Honda Civic Type R and cost him power for the rest of the race. Cook was then promoted to sixth when Chilton was given a penalty for his misdemeanour.

Hill was the first to jump Rowbottom, but Cook looked blisteringly quick and had vaulted the BMW to run right in the wheeltracks of Sutton and Ingram when a puncture struck and forced him to the pits, rejoining a lap down. The West Countryman reckoned debris was the cause. “The track is particularly scattered today with objects,” he observed.

Once Hill also began to fade, to be gazumped by Cammish for third just over a lap from the finish, that meant Sutton had no worries about soft-shod warriors looming up behind Ingram. “I was just trying to stay alive and stay ahead of those guys before they got to me,” he acknowledged. “We had a big swing in car set-up to try and cover up what we experienced in race one. It was a bit lively and nervous at the start, and I had a lot of pressure from Tom. Once we settled down and found that rhythm and pace, and got a couple of car lengths between me and Tom, I was able to manage it from then.”

Now the leading Hyundais would have to take their soft-tyre medicine in race three, but the good news for all the leading contenders was that Sutton drew the minimum-damage ball of ‘6’ in the reversed-grid lottery. Chilton was on pole and Ingram fifth, but there were furrowed brows out the back of the Excelr8 garage as drivers, engineers and Goodyear tyre men pow-wowed.

For all that, and his status as a seasoned veteran of tin-tops, few expect Chilton to do anything but go hell-for-leather when such an opportunity presents itself. And sure enough, that’s exactly what the extrovert Surrey racer did. But while Rowbottom, alongside him on the front row, was forced to nurse the soft tyres on his Ford and eventually came home sixth, Chilton never looked under threat.

Once Ingram was in second place, and Sutton – on mediums – up to third, the four-time champion appeared to be looking good to haul in the Hyundais in front. But, he opined, “they’ve had all day to learn from everyone else. I knew they weren’t going to be as bad as we were in race one. We were the guinea pigs in that. They were able to prepare the car in a much better way. If we were able to have that knowledge, it probably would have been a completely different outcome for my team-mate DanCam and myself.”

Chilton took full advantage of his race three pole to charge to victory

Photo by: JEP

It was still tricky, but one beneficial aspect for Ingram and Chilton was that, by late afternoon, temperatures had dropped slightly. Even so, reckoned Ingram, “you just had to nurse it. Those last four laps were disgusting quite frankly, they were repulsive, I didn’t enjoy them at all. I was bursting for a wee and I had Ash staring down on me!”

Cammish completed a day that had started disastrously with a strong fourth. “It was all a bit of a recovery, wasn’t it?” he pondered. Morgan’s first weekend in the Excelr8 Hyundai squad, which started with all his Q1 laps being deleted for track limits and his race one DNF, culminated in a fine fifth on mediums. And Rowbottom began what is his season of reckoning with very solid 3-5-6 results: “Not quite where I wanted to be on target points, but not far away.”

But now the target for him, and everyone else, is to get closer to Sutton and Ingram.

Sutton and Ingram are the early pacesetters in the BTCC after the Donington Park opener

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images