Tom Ingram has revealed that a lack of grip in the Brands Hatch finale cost him any opportunity to beat Jake Hill to this year’s British Touring Car Championship title.
Ingram, the 2022 champion, trailed Hill by just one point going into a winner-takes-all final race, and rain before the race put him in a confident mood.
PLUS: How the BTCC showdown culminated in a new king of the Hill
He had steered his Excelr8 Motorsport Hyundai i30 N Fastback to two convincing race wins in wet conditions in the penultimate round at Silverstone and was starting just one place behind Hill on the reversed grid in the third race at the Kent venue.
While Ingram quickly got ahead of Hill at the start, he was unable to prevent the new champion from getting back past him for fourth position on lap five of 15. By the finish, he had fallen to sixth place.
"Just a massive lack of grip, so I couldn’t get it stopped, I couldn’t turn it, I couldn’t get off the corner,” Ingram told Autosport.
“I just felt like I was on an old tyre right from the get-go. Frustrating, disappointing, but it’s one race out of 30, isn’t it?
“It’s just that this one race out of 30 was the one we needed. But I don’t think we can be disappointed overall with this year, because we’ve done fantastically.”
Although the Hyundai has been extremely quick all season following a winter of development led by Ingram’s engineer Spencer Aldridge and bolstered by incoming Team Dynamics technical director Barry Plowman, it struggled in qualifying at Snetterton back in May in rainy conditions, when Ingram could do no better than 12th in qualifying.
“Just frustrating that we couldn’t get the performance out of it,” Ingram added about his Brands performance.
“We’ve got no idea why – we’ve just got to dig into it. It felt like it did at Snetterton earlier in the year, so Silverstone maybe fooled us slightly.
“When we had that qualifying performance at Snetterton we were slow, and it felt like we had the same car back again unfortunately.
“We’ve got work to do – we’ve got five days’ testing in Anglesey coming up. No doubt it’ll be wet so we can get some mileage under our belt!”
