How a BTCC underdog is beating five manufacturers

There are five manufacturer teams contesting this year's British Touring Car Championship, but a new name sits at the top of the points table.

Speedworks Motorsport Toyota Avensis driver Tom Ingram is the season's only double winner and has a healthy 14-point buffer over double champion Colin Turkington in his WSR BMW 125i M Sport. The potential that Ingram has shown since he first stepped into the cockpit of the Speedworks car back in 2014 is finally being realised.

Ingram started racing at 16 in Ginetta Juniors, so like so many racing drivers these days he is hardly a novice. But gelling with the BTCC is something that can take lots of seasons: it is as much about the canny racecraft and the knowledge of when to push and when not to as it is about outright speed.

Ingram seems to have added both to his armoury in a very short time, and he is still only 23 years old.

Only two drivers in their 20s have topped the points coming out of a meeting during the previous five years: Andrew Jordan and Sam Tordoff. And Ingram's achievements this season come in a year when the works Honda, Subaru and MG teams have been joined by factory BMW and Vauxhall entries.

Maybe it is too early to say that Ingram has come of age, but he has certainly taken some huge strides forward this season, hence he is turning his promise into solid results.

But what has been the change? What has clicked this year to turn that speed into podium finishes? Team boss Christian Dick says there was more to last season's topsy-turvy performances than perhaps meets the eye.

Ingram planted himself firmly on the British Touring Car Championship radar with a stunning second place at Rockingham near the end of 2015. It wasn't just that he came oh-so-close to a maiden victory in Northamptonshire that caught the eye, it was also the way he had battled with two-time champion Jason Plato (pictured above).

He refused to be beaten even when he was passed for the lead, and repassed his rival.

But even Ingram himself wasn't satisfied - when he scored a second podium of the year with second place in race two of the Brands Hatch season finale, he was even more pleased. "That was a real result," he said. "I didn't need a reversed grid draw for this one, so this one feels more genuine."

So that ramped up the expectation ahead of 2016. There was only one more thing for him to conquer, and that was the very top step of the podium. The goalposts had very firmly moved heading into the fresh campaign.

"That was what caught us off-guard a little bit," explains Dick. "We knew we had the speed to challenge for podiums everywhere. We knew we could do it. However, it all went a bit too well..."

It did go well. Right from the start too. In the first meeting of the season, Ingram was straight on the pace with his first career pole position on the Brands Hatch Indy circuit by setting a new qualifying record to eclipse the factory Team Dynamics Honda Civic Type R of Gordon Shedden.

And it got better still. During the 27-lap race, Ingram survived an early-race safety car period to dominate the event by more than two seconds. There were tears as Ingram stepped from the podium with his maiden winner's trophy.

But then it fell apart. In the second race at Brands Hatch, Ingram was defending the lead from Rob Collard's WSR BMW 125i M Sport when the pair made contact (pictured above). That torpedoed his weekend's scoring potential.

This started a pattern. In race two at Donington Park, after a solid fifth place in the opener, Ingram was shoved out onto the grass while fighting over a podium position. Another strong-scoring weekend was gone. And then Thruxton too: second place in the opening race looked like it would finally set him up for his breakthrough consistent weekend. Then, a jumped-start penalty when he was on the front row for race two ruined things.

It wasn't until the fourth meeting of the season that the double Ginetta champion managed to string three decent results together. Two fifths and a fourth might not be the fanfare results that turned heads, but he scored twice as many points as he had at Donington and Thruxton.

There was another win later in the season, which came when the MG pair of Ash Sutton and Josh Cook were kicked out of Silverstone race one for a rear-wing infringement. Ingram eventually finished 10th in the points, but there was an element of frustration that there had been chances that had gone begging.

"The problem was that we won a race too soon, in a way," explains Dick. "We weren't really prepared for that. Our mission was to win races and we concentrated on speed everywhere.

"That was maybe our undoing. We weren't ready to take a step back and think about a championship so we were just pushing everywhere. We hadn't thought about anything else.

"That caught us out, because when you are pushing for victories and just to be fastest, sometimes things go wrong."

Things have changed in the Speedworks Motorsport camp. Ingram is sitting on top of the points pile after two meetings and six races in 2017. He has only fallen out of the top 10 once - when he placed 11th at Brands Hatch in race three, mainly thanks to soft tyres and 57kg of success ballast. Other than that, there has been a real step forward.

How Ingram has raised his game

Comparing Ingram's 2017 start to the previous two seasons

"We talked about this over the winter," Dick says. "We realised that we had to have a different approach. We had lifted the weight off our shoulders by winning that race at Brands Hatch last year - and Silverstone too - but to take the next step, we needed to think harder about how to put a campaign together."

Ingram knows it too. His mantra this year has been "points, points, points".

"We did sit down and talk things through," says Ingram. "There is a method to winning this championship, and it isn't necessarily about winning each round.

"Sometimes you have to accept what you have, because you are never going to always have the perfect car: you will have weight and you will have different tyres at different stages of the season. You have to take that into account and take the best finish you can. It is a long game after all."

And part of that longer game was evident at Donington Park's second meeting of the season, Ingram coming to the track in second place in the points.

Ingram carried 66kg of championship success ballast and he chose to take the harder option tyre - an unknown quantity at Donington, as last year's option rubber was the softs. That meant he went into the race in a less-than-advantageous position, but letting faster cars go and then being a roadblock let him hang on to fifth place.

That was damage limitation and it offered him the chance to leapfrog the others who had taken the hard tyre pain in race two and those who had more weight than him bolted on, and win.

"It was all part of the plan, but it was crucial to hold on to the best finish we could in race one," says Ingram. "That is what set us up to do what we did by winning race two.

"Sure, we have had some luck this season, but we have also created some results with our strategy. We just need to keep on doing that."

While it's true Ingram has had some fortune, those are the opportunities a driver has to exploit to put together a title challenge.

Matt Neal and Turkington non-scored after colliding in the opening round and Shedden was kicked out of the Donington Park finale for a ride-height infringement. Had it not been for that, the Scot would have been ahead: but only by a handful of points from Ingram.

If the Toyota man can maintain his equilibrium over the next 24 rounds, there is no reason why he can't be the new face of the BTCC at the end of the season. It won't be for a lack of hard work.