Should you want evidence of how quickly fortunes can change in motorsport, just ask any of the British Touring Car Championship’s leading quintet of drivers about their Donington Park weekend.
Take Tom Ingram, who went from a race-two retirement with a stone through his radiator to a storming drive from 19th to second in the finale. Or Ash Sutton, who landed just his second win of the season in the middle contest but then failed to be a classified finisher in race three after suffering damage in a collision. Then there was Colin Turkington, who went from two strong results to facing the wrong way at the hairpin to recovering well.
And Dan Cammish, who rebounded from being speared off onto the Redgate grass in the second encounter to land his first victory of the season in the next bout. Or even Jake Hill’s recovery from his sickbed to recapturing the points lead.
It really was the definition of a topsy-turvy weekend – and it all started with Josh Cook taking his first pole for over two years. The Speedworks Toyota Corolla driver has been gradually getting more and more comfortable with his new steed after spending the past five seasons racing Honda machinery, and achieved two non-reversed-grid wins and a second in the three events prior to the series’ return visit to Leicestershire.
But Cook knew he had a challenge on his hands with Turkington’s West Surrey Racing BMW 330e M Sport lining up alongside him on the front row for the opener. Turkington was disappointed to miss out on a third consecutive pole by just 0.071 seconds as the free choice of tyres in qualifying made for a tough decision for the teams. Turkington opted for a new set of saved softs, which he stuck with throughout the three segments, but admitted he had lost the best performance from them by Q3.
That proved largely trivial, however, as the Northern Irishman surged into the lead at the start, with Cook slightly slow away, and the BMW remained at the front throughout. Not that it was easy, as he had to manage a safety car restart – when Andrew Watson’s Toyota spectacularly crashed into the Esses’ tyre stack – and later Turkington’s fellow four-time champion Sutton closed in with his Alliance Racing Ford Focus.
“It’s always a tough race when Ash is behind you!” smiled Turkington, who was able to repel Sutton for the one lap of extra hybrid boost his rival had remaining before pulling clear in the final few laps.
Sutton had moved up to second after Cook had a wobble out of the Old Hairpin early on and another moment through the Esses left him striking that troublesome tyre stack and dropping a further place behind Hill’s BMW.
“We just struggled with pace, going uphill we seemed to be a lot slower than the BMW and Ford – you try to make that up through the corners, but it really bites you,” said Cook of his sideways action.
While Sutton benefited from those problems for his good mate, it was clear that his Focus was looking far more potent this time. He arrived at Donington with just one win to his name in 2024, compared to the eight he had already scored by this point last year.
“We just came here with a slightly different package in terms of set-up and put the car in a better place in terms of a working window and we’ve unlocked some of that 2023 performance we’ve been missing,” he explained. “We’ve got to crunch time and we need to try to claw some points back.”
"It’s a truly stupid game we seem to play, this is – I don’t really understand why we do it!" Tom Ingram
Sutton did just that again in the second contest, which began with the drivers facing a tyre dilemma. With the medium Goodyears mandated for the races, the rubber appeared to be one fewer variable for the teams and drivers to contend with last weekend – only for a heavy rain shower to pour down shortly before race two. However, as quickly as it had arrived, it began to dry and Nick Halstead’s Hyundai i30 N Fastback was the only car starting the green-flag lap on slicks. But he soon realised the surface was too dry and bolted for the pitlane at the first opportunity.
Yet the conditions did still have an impact in the opening laps as Turkington admitted to being tentative. He was slow through the Old Hairpin and Sutton pounced through Schwantz. Just like a few hours earlier, the opening-lap lead change proved to be the only one – but again Sutton did not have things easy.
Ingram was on a charge in his Excelr8 Hyundai, seeking to continue the storming performance he displayed in the opener. The 2022 champion was in a feisty mood earlier and took to the Esses gravel as he battled with Mikey Doble for fourth, edging ahead into the hairpin. But he was then sent sideways as Doble’s Power Maxed Racing Vauxhall Astra – which had impressively qualified third to continue the squad’s recent strong performances – clattered into him.
“I had a bad series of events with Tom,” confessed Doble. “We were side by side for a few corners. I then got pushed out coming out of the hairpin and had to defend from Aron [Taylor-Smith, Doble’s Power Maxed team-mate]. When I was defending, I missed my braking point and hit Tom – it was completely unintentional and damaged the car quite badly.”
Ingram resumed in 12th but progressively picked off those ahead, aided Esses strife for Taylor-Smith to return to the fifth place that he had qualified in.
He then sought to continue that upward trajectory in race two and immediately jumped Cook off the line before going around the outside of key rival Hill at the hairpin and continuing to run side-by-side to seal the place into Redgate. Next up was Turkington and, on lap four of 14, the Hyundai dived ahead, this time on the inside of the hairpin, and he set off after Sutton.
Just as he was beginning to pressure the Focus, he suddenly dropped back on lap 10 before entering the pits on the following tour. A stone had pierced his radiator, causing coolant to leak and the engine to overheat, forcing him out, and what had been a slight points deficit to Hill after race one now stood at a larger 16.
Sutton’s second win of the season meant he had closed the gap to just nine to Hill, but he didn’t do himself any favours by selecting ball number 11 for the reversed-grid draw. That put him in the thick of the midfield chaos and, sure enough, he got caught up on the very first lap of the finale. He was battling team-mate Dan Rowbottom and Tom Chilton’s Hyundai into the Esses, but contact from the latter sent Sutton through the gravel and he had to pit with toe-link and exhaust damage.
Yet he remained remarkably sanguine afterwards, preferring to focus on the positive of the improved performance.
“We were very unlucky with the slight bit of contact there – it’s just touring cars isn’t it ultimately!” he said. “If there was someone at fault, I would maybe be a little bit more annoyed, but it’s just a racing incident. We were three-wide and got tagged and can’t do much more than that.”
It was another reminder of how quickly things can change, and Ingram also provided further evidence of that. Starting down in 19th, it seemed his title aspirations would take another dent. But Ingram had other ideas. He had rocketed up to 14th by the end of lap one and continued to rise rapidly from there, including making an important pass on Hill for eighth at Redgate. Ingram was admittedly aided by two safety car periods – one to recover debris from a puncture on Chris Smiley’s Restart Racing Cupra Leon, the other to retrieve Aiden Moffat’s stricken Toyota from the Esses gravel – that kept the field bunched together.
A terrifically close scrap for second involving Taylor-Smith, Doble, Adam Morgan (BMW), Cook and Rowbottom also boosted Ingram’s chances of a strong recovery. He had navigated his way to fourth by the second of those cautions and picked off Doble with an excellent move at Schwantz, taking advantage of his full allocation of eight laps of hybrid being available. Then, on the penultimate tour, he made another fantastic move, this time around the outside of Taylor-Smith at Coppice to complete a remarkable comeback that Ingram was somewhat bemused by.
“It’s a truly stupid game we seem to play, this is – I don’t really understand why we do it!” he postulated. “The highs are massive and the lows are terrible. It seems to go in waves, you seem to have terrible times that are followed by amazing times, just as you have amazing times followed by terrible times. You never seem to have a safe, beige run through it – you seem to have these mountains and crevasses that appear. This weekend was exactly that.”
Ingram also described digging deep to overcome the race-two disappointment: “I’ve done a lot of work over the years with a sports psychologist and that was where he came into his own. Those feelings and emotions that you have to park, the feelings and emotions you have to bottle, the feelings and emotions you want to let out but can’t, and you just have to think of the bigger picture. That was a case in point. A little bit of maturity and experience, I guess, and knowing it’s not over. I was incredibly emotional [after taking second] – I spent the entirety of the in-lap crying, I spent all of the interview with Louise [Goodman] crying.”
“Things seemed to work in my favour again coming back forward. It could very easily have been game over [after the contact]" Colin Turkington
A couple more laps and Ingram could actually have won, but Cammish – another who endured an emotional rollercoaster – stood firm. The three-time Porsche conqueror had set the pace in the mixed conditions of practice but struggled in qualifying to line up ninth for the opener and he was only able to move one place further forward. Things then got much worse in race two when he, Cook and Morgan tangled out of Redgate, which left Cammish’s Ford on the grass and he had to fight back to finish 11th. That misfortune turned into something far brighter when Sutton picked out ball number 11 and put his team-mate on pole.
Cammish then mastered the two safety car restarts and the tricky conditions with mid-race rain (during which Halstead again incorrectly pitted for wets!) to break his 2024 duck and land just a third win of the year for the NAPA Focuses. Although, when the rain arrived, Taylor-Smith did close in and the Irishman admitted he thought the win was potentially on, only for Ingram to have other ideas. Still, third was an excellent way for him to continue his run of being the only driver to score points in every race this year so far. Further back, another driver celebrating was Unlimited Cupra pilot Daryl DeLeon, who again underlined his potential by netting the best result of his BTCC career in ninth.
While Ingram’s and Cammish’s luck finally changed in race three, Sutton was not alone in being the victim of contact. Turkington – who was well placed to claw back some further points – was another in strife early on. Amid the typical bunching into the hairpin on lap two, Rowbottom clattered into Rob Huff’s Toyota– which was fitted with a new steering rack between FP1 and qualifying on Saturday in a bid to cure some handling woes – who in turn cannoned into Turkington, spinning the BMW around. His recovery may not have been quite of the same ilk as Ingram’s, but his rise back up to seventh still netted him some vital points.
“Things seemed to work in my favour again coming back forward,” Turkington admitted. “It could very easily have been game over [after the contact]. I think, because everybody was holding each other up, I was able to get back into it a bit. That was the slight frustration, my car was really fast.”
Nevertheless, Turkington closed the gap to the points summit from 54 to 43 and is optimistic.
“It’s nice to be the hunter with a bit of hybrid going to Silverstone!” he said with a glint in his eye.
But through all the chaos and contrasting emotions came Hill, who delivered consistently good results – two thirds and a fifth – to snatch a nine-point lead over Ingram heading to Silverstone. Not that it was straightforward either for Hill on a weekend when the team was remembering Laser Tools founder Martin Smith, who died recently. Hill was far from feeling his best and relied on some pre-qualifying jelly babies and naps between sessions to boost his energy on Saturday, before feeling slightly better on Sunday.
“At first I thought it was food poisoning, but now I’m not so sure – either way the feeling of being sick or always wanting to be sick when you’re in the car is not particularly nice,” he said.
But there were certainly no ill-effects on his driving as he picked up a handy 41 points across the weekend – which he was, unsurprisingly, “chuffed to bits” about. “It’s just the consistency, and we’ve scored another two podiums this weekend – I’m up to 11 for the year, which is fantastic – so we’ve done well,” Hill continued. “But Silverstone’s going to be a real challenge going into qualifying with no hybrid – it’s going to be a real fight.”
While Hill is apprehensive about the trip to Northamptonshire in three weeks’ time, Sutton is relishing his upturn in form – despite the disappointing way his weekend ended. “We’re in the mix – we came here 20 points behind, we leave here 20 points behind, so for us it’s a bit of a kick in the nuts,” he said. “But we know we’ve got a good car under us now and that gives me a bit more confidence in the package we’ve got going into the last two rounds.”
There may only be six races left in an enthralling season but, if the Donington weekend proved anything, it’s that there is still plenty of time for the leading quintet’s fortunes to have a few more ups and downs.
