British Touring Car Championship title contender Tom Ingram feared the prospect of a second crown had "slipped through our fingers" before his sterling recovery drive in Donington Park's third race.
The Excelr8 Motorsport driver had entered the event with a slender three-point lead over West Surrey Racing pilot Jake Hill, but this turned into a 16-point deficit after a stone pierced the radiator on Ingram's Hyundai i30 N Fastback in race two and caused him to retire.
The DNF also left him starting 19th on the grid for the finale but a string of blistering overtakes helped him charge through the field to a remarkable second place and reduce the gap to Hill to nine points.
INSIGHT: How Hill ended a BTCC weekend of ups and downs at the summit
"After that second race, I was filming our 24/7 series and I said that felt like it’s slipped through our fingers," Ingram told Autosport.
"We’d gone from having a 20-something-point championship lead [prior to the previous round at Knockhill] to suddenly not and it all of a sudden felt like it had gone. That’s where you have to dig deep and stay positive."
Ingram credited the work he has done with a sports psychologist in recent years for helping him bounce back so strongly.
"Those feelings and emotions that you have to park, the feelings and emotions that 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 of that," he added.
"[It was about having] a little bit of maturity and experience, I guess, and knowing it’s not over."
Ingram described his weekend as a whole - which included being clattered into by Mikey Doble's Power Maxed Vauxhall Astra in the opener - as a rollercoaster of emotions.
"You never seem to have a safe, beige run through it – you seem to have these mountains and crevasses that seem to appear," he said.
Reigning champion Ash Sutton was another who seemed set to profit from Ingram's race-two troubles, especially after the Ford Focus driver clinched just his second win of the season in that middle contest.
But his weekend also took a turn for the worse in the finale when contact while battling Tom Chilton and Dan Rowbottom at the Esses sent him off track and caused significant damage to his Alliance Racing Ford.
"We were just very unlucky with the slight bit of contact there – it’s just touring cars isn’t it ultimately!" said Sutton.
"If there was someone at fault, I would maybe be a little bit more annoyed but it’s just a racing incident.
"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 [not scoring in race three] 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."
