Two rounds in, the British Touring Car Championship title favourite for 2025 is a driver who hasn’t yet won a race. Brands Hatch last weekend was a mirror image of the opening round at Donington Park – this time, Ash Sutton and his Alliance Racing Ford pals seemed a little bit behind the curve; Jake Hill and his West Racing Surrey Racing BMW compadres were on fire.
Yet that mirror image rests upon a fulcrum of Tom Ingram and his Excelr8 Motorsport Hyundai. The 2022 champion and his car have been consistently excellent (would the team write that ‘Excelnt’?), yet circumstances have conspired to restrict Ingram’s results to three seconds, two thirds and a measly 11th.
As the teams take stock following their sunny weekend in Kent and look ahead to Snetterton, Ingram lies just five points behind four-time title winner Sutton, seven ahead of reigning champion Hill. And he’s looking formidably strong.
Ingram, therefore, won’t be losing too much sleep over the headlines at the Brands Indy circuit being dominated by WSR and its armada of 330i M Sports. After the head-scratching of Donington, Hill beat rookie team-mate Charles Rainford to pole and led the new boy – who by bizarre coincidence was born in the same Tunbridge Wells maternity ward as his team leader – to the squad’s 133rd BTCC race win, putting it ahead of former Vauxhall/MG powerhouse Triple Eight as the sole topper of the series’ victory tally chart. Daryl DeLeon then made it number 134, before Rainford stretched that record to 135 with another 1-2 over Hill.
WSR must be lauded for the work carried out since Donington, where the knock-on effects the team had feared regarding the removal of hybrid for 2025 came to ugly fruition. The difficulties had arisen from the shift in ballast placement for weight distribution, and the BMWs were slower than they had been when 55kg heavier… The graft continued through Saturday, with Hill’s engineer Craig Porley asserting that “I’ve never seen a group of people working so hard”. Big set-up changes led to Hill being late out for FP2 (again) and, added Porley, “we were just a minute away from being excluded from qualifying”, the Laser Tools Beemer appearing on its pit apron, as prescribed by the regulations, in the nick of time after more toil from the Sunbury spannerfolk.
Hill’s sixth place in the championship heading to Brands afforded him 11 seconds per lap of the precious TOCA Turbo Boost at a track where the record-shattering times meant the frontrunners were circulating in the 46s bracket. Ingram had just 3s, a big handicap on such a short circuit, yet somehow qualified fourth, a mere 0.201s adrift of polewinner Hill. And he’d “locked myself out” of using any TTB at all by pressing the button too early. That Hyundai i30 N Fastback had serious pace, and new team-mate Adam Morgan was on the money too in third position.
WSR’s trio of wins, kicked off by Hill heading a 1-2 in the opening race, was strong reward for the work undertaken after Donington to unlock pace from the BMW
Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images
“The car’s felt outrageous since we pushed it out in FP1,” beamed Ingram. “It’s just been mint, a really nice thing to drive. Front-end performance is ridiculous, loads of rear movement, just an absolute pleasure, doing exactly what I want it to do. Donington felt good, this weekend feels really good. People say, ‘Oh, you’ve got so much power in that thing’, which is utter horse… shovel. Yes, we’re all right, but the traction that we’re generating out of this thing now is truly ridiculous. We’re in a really good place.”
Talking of traction, another card flipping in the direction of WSR and its BMWs was a brand-new resurfacing of the second half of the track, through Surtees and Clearways. While this proved a bonus to everyone, it was particularly suited to the rear-wheel-drive machines.
“Everyone loves it,” observed Sutton, who could not escape Q1 on his single second of TTB, and lined his Focus ST up 13th for race one. “I know it really helps the rear-wheel-drive car in traction zones, but this track, you look at the history and it’s always been a BMW on the front row pretty much. Last year they locked it out, this year they’ve locked it out. It’s kind of expected to see them up there.”
“We had a plan going into it and basically, it was whoever got the launch better off the line was going to win the race. And to be fair Jake got a better launch than me, so it was my job to sit behind and just manage the gap to Tom” Charles Rainford
Compounding this was the sun-drenching we were enjoying. Track temperature on the black new asphalt was significantly higher than the greyer surface from the first half of the lap. And, with mandatory usage of the soft-compound Goodyear tyre for two races, the light-on-its-rubber BMW would benefit here too.
This proved the case through 24 uninterrupted laps in the opening race. “We had a plan going into it and basically, it was whoever got the launch better off the line was going to win the race,” explained Rainford. “And to be fair Jake got a better launch than me, so it was my job to sit behind and just manage the gap to Tom really. We know our BMWs are going to be good on the tyres, so that’s nice, and through the race I felt like I was getting slightly stuck by the car in front of me, and I was trying to back up Tom as he was catching me, and then using the boost to try to create the gap again.”
Rainford had the full allocation of 12 TTB laps to the 10 of Hill, six of Ingram and 12 of Morgan, who used his to close up and make it a Hyundai formation 3-4 at the finish. But this result meant that Hill, Rainford and Ingram would be forced by the sporting regulations to use the hard tyre in race two.
Looking good on the softs, therefore, were fourth-placed Morgan and, behind him, Dan Cammish. The Berkshire-domiciled Yorkshireman had spearheaded the Alliance Ford effort so far, despite his strong Donington weekend restricting him to seven seconds per lap of TTB in qualifying: “I think I drove some really good laps in there and got absolutely everything out of the car. It didn’t want to go any faster – at least not with me in it!”
DeLeon celebrates his maiden BTCC win in race two
Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images
Hill held on in front on the hard tyres remarkably well, but Cammish, who had moved into the soft-tyre vanguard when Morgan “made a massive hash of the start”, was just biding his time when a safety car put his plans on moving to the front on hold. As the safety car lights went out prior to the restart, suddenly the Ford slowed on Cooper Straight and ground to a halt on the entrance to Surtees, where it was smacked into by the unsighted Mikey Doble and Aiden Moffat. A distraught Cammish, it transpired, had accidentally pressed the button that turns off the ignition rather than the cooling fan, and a nailed-on win had evaporated.
Now the Focus needed recovering, before Hill led the field to the restart for an eight-lap sprint to the finish. Here, yet another new rule hastened his downfall to an eventual eighth place. In this case, the leader has to maintain safety car pace until a prescribed point just before the start-finish line. Gone is a key part of racecraft…
“I got shuffled out a bit when Daryl came past on the restart, this absolutely rubbish new restart system that we now have, and that then put me off line and I struggled to get that same grip level back, and then I kept getting shuffled and shuffled and shuffled,” bemoaned Hill. And yes, it was DeLeon who had crept up to take Cammish’s place in the queue. After finishing seventh in race one, he’d worked his BMW past Doble at the start, and also demoted Morgan on the opening lap before setting to work on the hard-tyred race-one podium men.
As everyone stacked up into Druids, Rainford reckoned a nerf from Sutton sent him into Hill, who dubbed it a “push-to-pass; we’ll see what happens. At the time I wasn’t best pleased because I didn’t know what had happened.” The thing was, the pass itself, and Hill’s attempts to fight back, effectively blocked the track with slow-moving hard-tyred BMWs for two laps, allowing the soft-shod 3-Series of DeLeon to scamper into the distance. Morgan finally came through to second, with Sutton winning a great fight with the Restart Racing Hyundai of Chris Smiley before claiming third.
Sutton, whose one-off livery, celebrating team title sponsor NAPA’s 100th anniversary, meant his Focus looked for all the world like Morgan’s 2015 Wix-backed Mercedes, had taken his hard-tyre pain in race one, and finished 10th. So too had Smiley, who was 12th but impressively set the quickest lap of anyone on the red-walled rubber. In race two, Sutton “wanted a little bit more but the safety car stopped that, and obviously it helped a few others out there”.
It without doubt hampered Ingram, the field-bunching dropping him out of the top 10, with engineer Spencer Aldridge explaining that the hard tyre on the front-wheel-drive machine was massively short on longitudinal grip. His best lap was on a par with Smiley’s on the hard tyre from race one, and quicker than Sutton’s.
What to do next? Armed full of TTB, burst through from 11th on the grid to the podium, of course. Hill, alongside reversed-grid poleman Dan Rowbottom’s Alliance Ford and back on the soft tyres, was the favourite, but the bearded Midlander got into Paddock Hill Bend in front. Did he make a mega start? “He did,” approved Hill, and I made an average start. I got wheelspin very late in the phase of the launch; as it bit it just spun the rears up, which is annoying. That just made it difficult. If I’d had a good start and got away, I think it would have been plain sailing all the way to the end.”
Rainford’s win in the finale capped the perfect weekend for WSR BMW
Photo by: JEP
Hill’s exertions to pass Rowbottom on lap one in turn opened the door for Rainford, who sailed around his outside at Surtees to claim the inside for Clearways, then zapped Rowbottom at Paddock. There was contact that knocked the Ford wide, but Rainford escaped with a reprimand. He’s getting the hang of this BTCC racecraft…
Rowbottom, who had “just no pace”, eventually sunk to ninth, and Hill moved up to chase Rainford “until Max Hall decided he wanted to come into the pitlane out of nowhere. I get he was trying to come across but mate – think about it, stay well out of the way, and he was dithering around. I don’t know how we didn’t hit. I had to lift, and I lost all of my run, and that just backed me right up into Tom and we had a classic touring car scrap.”
This was fantastic. Hill, despite having exhausted his TTB, somehow held off Ingram. “It was really close, not leaving an inch, being run out wide, me trying to get the cutback – just a hard touring car race,” summed up the Hyundai man.
“The Hyundai, I believe, is still the car to beat. I know we [WSR] have had three wins with three different drivers, but a lot of the time we’ve had a lot of deployment, we got our tyre strategy pretty good, so they were all factors in play, whereas those guys… their engine’s still ridiculously good” Jake Hill
On the way, Ingram passed Sutton, who had another battle with Smiley to take fourth. “We’ll go away and obviously have a little rethink of how we go about setting the car up or just try and experiment with a few different things,” summed up the championship leader. “We’re not a million miles away. The car felt mega in the last race if I’m honest; we made some really decent changes.” But still adrift of that Hyundai. “They do seem very very quick in a straight line. I get that they’re a better-shaped car, but…”
“The Hyundai, I believe, is still the car to beat,” Hill hypothesised. “I know we [WSR] have had three wins with three different drivers, but a lot of the time we’ve had a lot of deployment, we got our tyre strategy pretty good, so they were all factors in play, whereas those guys… their engine’s still ridiculously good.” Ingram, of course, would scoff that Sutton and Hill are talking a load of horse… shovel.
Is Ingram really the BTCC contender to beat or are his rivals piling on the pressure?
Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images
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