How a "perfect" post-season test set up Ingram for his second BTCC crown

Tom Ingram is now a two-time winner of the British Touring Car Championship. He’s sprayed the champagne on the end-of-season podium, he’s done the photo shoots, interviews, posed for selfies with spectators, taken the congratulations from well-wishers.

Now he’s in the back of the Excelr8 Motorsport truck, quaffing on a well-earned Peroni as darkness falls on the Brands Hatch paddock outside. And answering more questions.

“This is pretty bloody special, I’ll be honest with you,” he sighs. “I didn’t really know what to expect coming into this weekend, because there were so many unknowns with general pressures, finale jitters, finale nerves, finale weather.”

That first title, in 2022, came after a final-race showdown against Ash Sutton and Jake Hill. Back then, Excelr8 was the little-team-made-big, its Hyundai i30 N Fastback still relatively early in development. Sutton and the team now known as Alliance Racing – or NAPA Racing UK – turned the tables in 2023 with a dominant campaign in the massively re-engineered Ford Focus ST.

Hill claimed honours last year for the mighty West Surrey Racing with the BMW 3 Series, beating Ingram at the last gasp… “This one feels more special,” Ingram continues. “The first one felt like we came into the weekend as the underdogs and pulled it off. This year we have left nothing unturned and you know what? I take more satisfaction from this one.

“We won it in 2022, and we came back in 2023 and NAPA dominated, and actually it changes the way you think, what you look at and the work ethic that goes into it.

“I take more satisfaction in knowing that we turned around a NAPA domination in 2023 into being a very good car in 2024, and then going another step further in 2025. We were testing two weeks after the season finished.

“Everyone has a very short memory as to the performance we had in 2023 against the NAPA cars. The work of [team-mates] Tom [Chilton], Adam [Morgan], Senna [Proctor], myself, as well as all our engineers, our mechanics, everyone who has been involved, we have created an absolute monster of a touring car that is beyond a pleasure to drive.”

Ingram clinched the title with a race to spare at October’s Brands Hatch season finale

Photo by: JEP

That work began two weeks after disappointment in the 2024 finale, when Ingram and Chilton spent three days pounding the Hyundais around Anglesey.

Back in late 2021, prior to the first year of hybrid, Ingram had tested the car with ballast added exactly where the hefty Cosworth kit would be located, taking advantage of engineer Spencer Aldridge’s knowledge from their Speedworks Motorsport days, when that team had carried out the development testing on the system. It played a key part in his 2022 triumph.

Bearing in mind the removal of hybrid for 2025 was announced last winter, and that the teams surely knew what was coming, was testing without that weight the focus of the Anglesey running? “You’ve got it!” chimes Ingram. “That’s exactly what we did. That was very much the gameplan of what we wanted to do.

“We had all but three days of perfect running, almost to the point that track temperature was almost exactly the same at every single part of the day, the wind was non-existent. It was like being on a simulator – you were able to get three days identical. It was incredibly useful for us.”

"We’re not the same philosophy as we were in 2021. It’s a complete revolution from there. We had to reinvent the wheel" Tom Ingram

Clearly, it’s not as simple as bolting the 2021 set-up back on, because of the development that has taken place since then. “We’re not the same philosophy as we were in 2021,” explains Ingram. “It’s a complete revolution from there. But also a lot of the stuff we worked on in 2022, 2023, 2024 has become totally irrelevant.

“We had to reinvent the wheel, and that’s where those three days that Vertu [the team’s title sponsor] very kindly invested heavily in for us was a real kick up the backside: it’s not just take the weight out and away you go.

“Tom and I both left at the end of the three days feeling pretty confident if I’m honest, pretty happy with what we’d done, and good that we were able to do a lot of that even before people’s hangovers had stopped from the weekend before.”

But still… “I’ve always been a firm believer, certainly in recent years, of just focus on us. That’s great, but when you’re testing at a circuit on your own, and we’re doing, let’s say, a 1m25s, for all we know Ash could have been going round at a 23.9, or he could have going round at 27.9. A lot of the time you just have to go, ‘Does it feel right? And is it doing what we want it to? Yes. Well, we have to be pleased with that.’”

Ingram's car felt perfect and was massively quick from first flying lap of practice at Oulton Park

Photo by: JEP

The result has been a car that Ingram has praised all season. His qualifying record, even on his usual one second per lap of TOCA Turbo Boost as the championship leader, has been incredible: he put it in the top four at all but the final two rounds.

You’d probably say that main rival Sutton and his own tech wizard Antonio Carrozza played a slightly cannier strategy across the year with tyre choice on race days, otherwise the title could have been wrapped up at least a race earlier.

Much has been made of the straightline performance, but Ingram and his Excelr8 cohorts argue that it’s a combination of engine, mid-corner performance (not to mention his incredible corner entry speeds), and the advantageous aero of the Hyundai’s fastback shape.

“This is the great thing,” he enthuses. “As a base car, I really don’t think you’re going to beat it in terms of the shape of a touring car. We always thought the Avensis [Ingram’s 2014-18 weapon at Speedworks] was a great shape, and this thing’s just gone a step further.”

And, while Sutton and Carrozza seem to have spent many weekends trying different philosophies before hitting the sweet spot on the ageing, boxy Focus, Ingram and Aldridge have often been there right from the get-go.

“A lot of the time we’ve not touched the car – we’ve given it a bit of a polish and put some fuel in it,” chuckles Ingram. “What it means is that you can focus on the driver. I know we always joke that the driver’s always perfect, but actually there’s a huge, huge, huge underutilised factor, which is the driver.

“The first thing we always do is look at the car, but actually if you can focus on the driver as well in terms of having the car in a nice window… Oulton Park was a great example of that. We rolled out for FP1 and my first flying lap just felt spot-on.

“‘What do you need from the car?’ ‘Nothing, it’s perfect. I’ve got no issues with it at all; it does everything I need it to do. Front-end performance limitless, I’ve got limitless traction, I can smash every single kerb on the circuit and nothing happens.’

Ingram reckons his second BTCC crown feels more special after leaving “nothing unturned”

Photo by: JEP

“So we start going through it, and while we talk about Spencer as a huge part of the team, Matt Campbell, my data engineer [who Ingram describes as “the unsung hero of car 80”], is as good in that triangle between Spencer and me as anybody.

“Matt knows exactly what Spencer and I need from the job: ‘There’s a two-thousandth here, a hundredth there, a quarter of a tenth here’. Then all of a sudden you improve by another two tenths. That’s the lovely thing.”

The shame about this year is that the title fight has been more from a distance, with Ingram and Sutton often diverging on tyre strategy. “I’d say we’ve both learned a lot off each other as well in terms of that,” reckons Ingram.

“I think Ash has gained a bit more respect for me than he had before, and likewise. We’ve seen the strategic games and battles being played more than we have in other seasons. It was better for Ash to finish fourth than third at Oulton [in race one], and on that weekend he outscored me by effectively giving away points.”

"My mentality of being in this championship is never to be a team-hopper. For me, longevity has always been the key to it" Tom Ingram

As well as the BTCC title, Ingram became the first driver to win back-to-back RAC TT Celebration races in two different cars at the Goodwood Revival when he teamed up with Richard Kent in the famous Jaguar E-type ‘CUT 7’. Unbeknown to most, Excelr8’s hugely popular veteran team manager Marvin Humphries played a small part.

“There was a special connection because the ‘CUT 7 Jag’ is one Marvin used to run when Nick Whale had it. We had Marvin at home watching with a tear in his eye while a car he ran 20 years ago won the race with me in it! Marvin brought in what must have been 40 pages of a feature in a magazine on it, all the stats, all the ‘we used to do this, we used to do that’ – everything on file from when he ran it.”

And what of 2026? Ingram’s deal with Excelr8 runs out about now, but “my mentality of being in this championship is never to be a team-hopper. For me, longevity has always been the key to it. It never means I’m writing myself out of being open to offers from elsewhere, but realistically I think what we’ve built around us, we’re in a really special place. I’ve certainly got no intentions of going elsewhere.”

And anyway, there’s some testing of the Hyundai with developments for 2026 booked in early November…

This article is one of many in the monthly Autosport magazine. For more premium content, take a look at the November 2025 issue and subscribe today. 

Goodwood victory in famous ʻCUT 7ʼ E-type had a special team connection