The Croft Wonderland that marked the latest chapter in a BTCC title-fight thriller

As you drive into the pretty North Yorkshire village of Croft-on-Tees, you pass a sign proclaiming it as ‘the childhood home of Lewis Carroll’.

Certainly, things got surreal at the local racetrack’s round of the British Touring Car Championship over the weekend. Tom Ingram was grinning like the Cheshire Cat regarding the quality of the Hyundai machinery with which he had been provided by Excelr8 Motorsport; Ash Sutton as the White Rabbit who was late for a very important date with the top step of the podium, thanks to a hole in the left-front tyre of his Alliance Racing-run NAPA Ford in race one. Yet each ended the day in Wonderland: Ingram, the winner of the opener, had converted a 10-point deficit to Sutton in the standings to an eight-point advantage, while Sutton put in a racecraft masterclass to take victory in a finale so crazy you half-expected the Mad Hatter to put in an appearance.

Renowned confectionary connoisseur Ingram certainly has been devouring ‘Eat Me’ cookies to grow to a giant size in qualifying this season. Despite his habitual mere three seconds of TOCA Turbo Boost, courtesy of his runner-up position in the championship, he claimed pole position in a Hyundai i30 N Fastback that has no equal in the series on pace.

“From the braking to the damping, the traction to the mid-corner, to the feel, to the engine – just everything has felt phenomenal today,” Ingram beamed. “It’s in such a lovely place. It was beyond a joy. I seem to say this every single weekend, but it genuinely amazes me how good it is. You just seem to be able to do what you want with it.”

He wasn’t as dominant on pace as he was at Oulton Park, scene of the last round before the summer break from which Croft was an emergence from hibernation. Of course, at the Cheshire venue Excelr8 was involved in a hoo-ha over the mounting of its splitter, with BTCC organiser TOCA closing off the rules loophole over the intervening weeks, but Ingram and the Hyundai are always on fire around Oulton so the tweak for Croft will have made next to no difference, if any at all.

As if to back that up, team-mate Tom Chilton set an even quicker time than Ingram’s, only to be one of a legion who fell victim to track-limits violations. Even so, dragging a final-lap flier for fourth out of his ageing tyres was a terrific comeback for the Surrey man and his crew, whose Hyundai had been wrecked in FP2 in a shunt at Clervaux when “I went to turn right, and it didn’t turn right”. Whether suspension or tyre failure at the left-front were to blame was unknown, since it was difficult to ascertain what was cause or effect from the shunt.

As happens so often, Dan Cammish led the line in qualifying for the Alliance Ford Focus STs, with a front-row slot on five seconds of TTB. Meanwhile, team-mate Sutton languished in 11th on his one second of boost. The championship leader had actually lapped just 0.003 seconds slower than Ingram in Q2, but that lap was deleted for track limits and his next best did not make the cut to progress to the Goodyear Quick Six shootout.

“There is something amiss on my car today,” puzzled Sutton. “We struggled to get the consistent one-lap pace. I struggled to do anything in the 1m20s in Q1, struggled on the first push lap in Q2, and then randomly we go three and a half tenths quicker. That caught me off guard and then we couldn’t repeat that. Not quite sure where that bit is. A bit of a kick in the nuts in that respect.”

Unlike at Oulton, where the rain and a strategic masterclass from Sutton’s crew enabled him to outscore Ingram on a weekend when the Ford did not have the pace of the Hyundai, this time the adverse weather did not impact things too greatly. The Sunday morning showers had stopped by the time the field emerged for the laps to the grid and, albeit on a slippery track, everyone took the start on slick tyres.

Sutton, clearly, was going to get his pain of using the hard slick out of the way in race one, given his grid position. Fortunately, this was the final weekend of the season with the hard-soft format, and again it served only to cause a lot of grumbling. Not that you’d have necessarily known that given Sutton’s progress… The bloke is a super-talent, and used the slippery surface to make progress up the field rather than sink – notwithstanding the fact that it’s even more difficult to switch the hard rubber on when it’s slippery.

“There’s a screw-shaped hole in the tyre that looks identical to what’s in the floppies at the back of the circuit. A real shame because those floppies got taken out for the rest of the day because a few people suffered the same thing” Ash Sutton

The Ford was up to sixth when, just before the restart following a mid-race safety car, Sutton slowed and was heading for the pits. Not only did he have a puncture, but his recovery to the pits had spiked the power-steering, which needed a reset before he resumed a lap down. “There’s a screw-shaped hole in the tyre that looks identical to what’s in the floppies at the back of the circuit,” he explained. “A real shame because those floppies got taken out for the rest of the day because a few people suffered the same thing. There was a hole in the dead centre of the tyre, and the floppies had a nice hefty screw through the back of them.”

The timing couldn’t have been worse. Had it happened when the safety car first emerged, Sutton could have stayed on the lead lap and fought for something: “I could have rejoined the back of the safety car line and maybe raced through and got a few more points. But look, we have our ups and downs.”

Up front, Ingram won from Cammish and “couldn’t really ask for it to go any better. It was fairly tricky, because you had the changeable track conditions which didn’t make it easy, so I had to keep an eye behind and keep him at arm’s length – or boost’s length, so I could keep the six or seven tenths or what it’s worth in the bank.”

A puncture and his power-steering needing to be reset forced Sutton to the back of the pack in the opener

Photo by: JEP

Under the 2025 sporting regulations, that meant Ingram, Cammish and Senna Proctor, who had betrayed his loose-surface roots by dancing his Excelr8 Hyundai from eighth to his finishing position of third on the opening lap, would have to go onto the hard tyre for race two. Dan Rowbottom, who fended off Chilton for most of the race, looked like he might be able to nab third from Proctor following the safety car, but “we wanted the soft tyre for race two. We had the pace to beat Proctor at the end, but we opted not to.”

The wisdom of the Midlander and veteran engineer Paul Ridgway paid off in race two. Rowbottom proved a dab hand at moves into the complex as he ascended to the lead by the end of lap three, and predictably Chilton followed him up the order to take second. “I’m happy with the form, happy with the car, our team, and my crew have done a phenomenal job,” enthused Rowbottom, whose third win of the season this was and is now back up to third in the points. “We’ve just to keep in the fight until Brands [the final round]. If not and I finish P3, that’s still my best season yet.”

While Ingram fell to eighth on his hard tyres, and Cammish to 10th, Sutton was making progress in the opposite direction. From 20th on the grid, he was up to fifth with just under six laps remaining, and the fourth-placed Excelr8 Hyundai of Adam Morgan looked vulnerable. But then he fell back into the clutches of Charles Rainford to just hold off the West Surrey Racing BMW 330i M Sport to the finish.

“We just didn’t get the set-up right for the soft tyre in that race, and we hurt the left-front very early on,” related Sutton. “We sort of underestimated how much the track was going to evolve and move on from the rain in race one. The last five laps were just nursing the car home.”

Rainford wasn’t the only WSR BMW driver in the top six. On a weekend where the team was largely without reigning champion Jake Hill, who withdrew after free practice because he was suffering from labyrinthitis, the others did seem to make a step forward from recent rounds and Daryl DeLeon finished a fine third, a day after the smiley Anglo-Filipino had celebrated his 20th birthday.

And in the other BMW, of course, is Aiden Moffat. The Scot has shown fine form at Croft before in a rear-wheel-drive car – remember his 2021 performance in the Infiniti? – and had been drawn on reversed-grid pole. Ingram was alongside, and few were peering through the looking glass and concluding that this would be anything but another victory for the new points leader.

Hill’s faint title defence hopes look over as he had to withdraw from Croft due to illness

Photo by: JEP

Not Moffat, though. His tenacious defence of his pole advantage through Clervaux led to contact with the Hyundai that produced a miracle save from Ingram but, crucially, allowed the hard-tyred BMW of Rainford into second place. And, like Moffat, he was damned if he was going to give that up easily either.

Sutton, fifth on the grid, came steaming through and, with no nonsense, dispatched Ingram and Rainford to run second by the end of the first lap. Then, next time round, came chaos. Contact from Rainford had put Cammish onto the grass into the complex, and the Ford bounced across the rough stuff before cannoning into the innocent DeLeon, with Chris Smiley also wiped out, and Rainford taking a hit that caused him to veer into Rowbottom, who lost a lap in the pits to repairs.

Following the inevitable safety car, Ingram pulled a wonderful move on Sutton that began at Hawthorn and was completed on the chicane-skipping Ford at Tower. Ingram went straight after Moffat, who defended into the hairpin, only to leave a chink of light on the inside that was filled by Sutton. The Ford had gone from third to first in an instant, despite taking a whack from behind into the hairpin from the Speedworks Motorsport Toyota Corolla GR Sport of a feisty Gordon Shedden, who in turn had been nudged into Sutton by Morgan. That put Shedden into a half-spin, and allowed Proctor – up from 18th on the grid – ahead of them both.

“Obviously disappointing to lose points to Ash in the last one, but at the same time given what was going on – it was utter carnage – I’m pleased to come out of it fairly unscathed” Tom Ingram

Ingram’s exertions to pass Moffat left him vulnerable to Proctor, who muscled his way into third place and played the team game to perfection for Excelr8 by pushing Moffat onto the grass at the complex and then opening the door for Ingram to grab second place. Proctor was given a reprimand for his move on the BMW, but was praised by Ingram. “Senna played a good team game in terms of trying to get the best out of the situation,” he nodded. “I don’t remember a race three being bruising like that for quite a while.

“I don’t think we can be disappointed about how this weekend’s turned out at all. Obviously disappointing to lose points to Ash in the last one, but at the same time given what was going on – it was utter carnage – I’m pleased to come out of it fairly unscathed in the grand scheme of things.”

Sutton’s contact from Shedden had knocked out the steering to an extent that he had the ideal set-up for a right-turning oval. “We ended up being 40 degrees left hand down to go straight so it was a huge amount in the car,” he chortled. “I don’t think I turned right in sector two at all – and that’s being brutally honest! The car was not in a good place…”

Elsewhere, the recriminations began, and Croft echoed to the Queen of Hearts’ “off with their heads” refrain as a crowd replete with entertainment departed through the childhood home of Lewis Carroll.

Ingram turned a 10-point deficit into an eight-point lead over Sutton at Croft

Photo by: JEP