How Cammish outshone Sutton and Ingram at Oulton Park to have an outside look at a BTCC title chase

When we get to the end of this British Touring Car Championship season, will we look back at the Oulton Park weekend as the one where Tom Ingram began to turn the tide against the runaway advantage of Ash Sutton? Maybe. “Considering where we came into the weekend, we were on the catch-up,” reflected reigning champion Ingram, who arrived in Cheshire with a 57-point mountain to climb. “It was one of those that we needed to get something out of. The goal was to try and get it [the gap] into the forties.”

This he did. Ingram didn’t take a win at Oulton at the wheel of his Excelr8 Motorsport Hyundai i30 N Fastback, but enjoyed what he famously describes as a “pointsy” weekend. He accumulated 55 of them, while Sutton, who did manage a victory in his Alliance Racing-run NAPA Ford Focus Titanium, emerged with 46. So the difference is now 48.

But outscoring them both, on one of his finest weekends to date in the BTCC, was Sutton’s Alliance Ford team-mate Dan Cammish. The Berkshire-based Leeds man hoarded up 61 points, and now stands just 12 behind Ingram. As well as taking a third and a fourth, Cammish inherited his first victory of the season in Saturday’s qualifying race, then added honours in Sunday’s opener.

That came despite those clever mathematicians within BTCC organiser TOCA’s technical team snipping 20 millibars of boost from the Focuses prior to the weekend. This was as a result of data showing that the yellow-and-blue machines were a fraction outside the parameters and would, they surmised, result in a negligible loss of less than 3bhp – but at least it would put them back inside the tolerances.

Cammish entered the weekend fourth in the championship, therefore restricted to seven seconds per lap of TOCA Turbo Boost – to the maximum 20 – through Saturday’s qualifying and half-points race. But he was on it from the word go, topping his qualifying group, and only pipped to Saturday race pole by Aron Taylor-Smith, who went 0.009s quicker in the other split.

“We’ve just been strong from the moment the car came out of the truck,” reflected Cammish at the end of the weekend. “I know James [Mundy, his engineer] did some work between Snetterton and here. I don’t know exactly what he’s done and what’s on it, but he went away and thought about it hard, and from the moment it hit the track it’s just been good. I think the weather’s helped – it’s been cold and overcast, and the car has been quick and we’ve used it to good effect.”

While Taylor-Smith’s performance may have surprised some, the Irishman did have the full 20s of boost, and Oulton was always reckoned to be one of the better tracks for the Speedworks Motorsport-run Toyota Corolla GR Sport hatchbacks. Stablemate Josh Cook, second to Cammish in his group, raved about the chassis through the parkland swoops and compressions, and hopes were high.

After being handed victory in the qualifying race due to Taylor-Smith's penalty, Cammish duly converted it into race one victory

Photo by: JEP

Sure enough, Taylor-Smith led Cammish and Cook all the way through the qualifying race, but lost the victory. This was because he was given a 5s penalty during the race for weaving behind the safety car once its lights had gone out. It’s a rule that’s come hand in hand with the stipulation since the beginning of last season that the leading car has to maintain safety car speed – no braking and checking-up – to the green light. “That was a shame for him,” offered a magnanimous Cammish. “That’s never how you want to pick up a race win, but equally I’ll take it where I can.”

“A little bit of a kick in the teeth,” bemoaned Taylor-Smith. “Truth be told, I did not know of that penalty or rule. I’m disappointed for myself, but more so for everyone at the team.” To be fair to Taylor-Smith, it would be the first time he’s been the leader behind the safety car in recent times. But he did promise to brush up on his regulations over the seven-week break before the next round at Thruxton.

Sutton and Ingram kept themselves inside Taylor-Smith’s penalty window for third and fourth respectively after a robust moment. Ingram biffed the Ford wide at Lodge Corner, before immediately handing the position back. “Ash might have braked a bit early, I probably braked a little bit late,” mused Ingram. “It’s just probably a cock-up on my side.” Sutton, who just managed to avoid conceding an additional place to Mikey Doble, reckoned “it wasn’t anything intentional. You know as a driver when you’ve done wrong – and he unfortunately locked up and just ran into the back of me.”

Cammish has rarely managed to consistently escape the shadow of Sutton over their four and a bit years at the Alliance squad – then again, who would?

It happened to Sutton again in Sunday’s opener, this time at the hands of Cook on the opening lap. The Toyota slid wide into the Ford at Cascades, and Cook reckoned their bumpers hooked together. That sent Sutton into a big slide and down to eighth. He recovered to sixth, and was trying to get past Adam Morgan’s Plato Racing Mercedes for fifth at the Hislop’s chicane when he ran out of room and bounced across the grass.

This restricted the four-time champion to seventh: “Just not a car width left on the outside, so I had to make my own room across the grass,” admitted Sutton. “That put us on the outside for the next couple of corners and we just got eaten up by the pack. It’s a shame, because we probably could have hung around at the front with Tom, Josh, Dan in race one quite easily. The pace was good in the car, but we were now out of synch with everyone.”

What Sutton meant by ‘out of synch’ was the rulings on tyre compounds. Just when you thought the soft/hard combo that proliferated through the first half of the 2025 season was nothing more than a bad dream, it was back for Oulton. As the top three in race one, Cammish, Cook and Ingram were forced onto the hard Goodyears for race two; Sutton was on the softs again.

Sutton, in the wars over the weekend, did produce a dominant display in race two - winning by a margin rarely seen in the BTCC

Photo by: JEP

Top of those on softs, after a solid fourth in race one, was Taylor-Smith. But Sutton, who had already got past the Power Maxed Racing Audis of Doble and Aiden Moffat at the start, quickly dispatched the Laser Tools Toyota when it was elbowed wide while trying to pass Ingram.

Sutton then wasted little time in passing Cook, Ingram and Cammish, and strode away to win by the gargantuan margin of over 19 seconds.

Remarkably, Ingram and Cammish, who swapped positions in the Hyundai’s favour at Lodge with four laps remaining, maintained second and third – on the hard tyres. Key to this was Taylor-Smith. The Toyota lacked pace, but a determined drive – too determined in the case of his incident with Tom Chilton, who was fired off the road, giving Taylor-Smith another penalty – kept everyone else at bay for all but the final five laps. By the time Daryl De Leon’s West Surrey Racing BMW cleared the very wide Toyota, it was too late to catch the pair in front.

“When you look at what they had [on lack of TTB and hard tyres] compared to having boost and a soft tyre, it’s two seconds a lap minimum around here,” Sutton modestly offered of his chasm to Ingram and Cammish. “I was in clean air, got my head down and got away. Tony [Carrozza, Sutton’s engineer] came over the radio and said, ‘Look, let’s build up as much as we can’ because we knew there was some bad weather due, and it was how hard it was going to come down. We needed a very good buffer because you never know what can happen.”

It did rain in the final couple of laps. That didn’t stop Sutton, but it did give Cammish hope of another crack at Ingram, who had benefited from his additional two laps of TTB in making his overtaking manoeuvre: “One more lap might have been fun.” That didn’t come to pass, and it was heads-up driving from both that allowed them to notch up their against-the-odds podiums.

“The key was to try and get a gap [to Taylor-Smith], because it was going to be beneficial for the both of us not to fight, because all that was going to do was mean both of us were going to finish down the pack,” explained Ingram. “The car felt so good,” observed Cammish. “And then just in the middle I said to my engineer, ‘The front-left’s just screaming at me, I can tell I’m hurting it.’ It didn’t hurt the balance too much but the pace just dropped off a touch. If you’d told me I was going to finish third on the hard I’d have snapped your hand off and ran away.”

From the fifth row of the reversed-grid finale, Cammish and Ingram again looked likely lads, given they were on soft rubber – and only two of those in front of them were on the same compound. Sutton was stuck on the hards from 11th, and his and Carrozza’s cunning plan to never have to use that unloved rubber, which famously succeeded at this same venue in 2025, ended up turning a bit Baldrick-esque.

No wins for Ingram this weekend but it was still mission accomplished as he cut Sutton's points lead down to 48

“We made some dramatic changes as well before that last race in preparation for the rain, but the rain didn’t come,” shrugged Sutton of his run to ninth. “The radars were saying it would, and they’d been right all day, but unfortunately they just weren’t right there. The car balance, was it optimal? Probably not. But we still progressed forward. We were on the back foot obviously. We had no deployment around a lot of cars, on the hard, so we ended up finishing third car on hards.”

Ahead of Sutton on the hard tyres? Take a bow, poleman Chris Smiley (seventh in his Restart Racing Hyundai) and Dexter Patterson (eighth in PMR Audi) – that’s definitely worth some bragging rights to beat the BTCC’s top dog, although obviously they did have a handy surfeit of TTB.

Up front, it was another story of the weekend, with the soft-tyred battle for victory falling to Charles Rainford’s WSR BMW from the Excelr8 Hyundai of Ricky Collard. Each had started the day running the hard rubber in race one after a disappointing Saturday. Their form will be discussed in more depth in this week’s column.

"That last race was good. Ingram was very quick up until the second safety car, and the top two with all their boost… that was as far as I was going to go, but that’s absolutely fine" Dan Cammish

Hard on their heels was third-placed Ingram, who pulled off a peach of a move into Old Hall on Cammish, who in turn fended off a resurgent Cook.

“Look at it – there’s not a mark on the old girl, and that’s nice for the guys going into the summer break,” beamed Cammish as the evening chill set in over the pitlane. “That last race was good. Ingram was very quick up until the second safety car, and the top two with all their boost… that was as far as I was going to go, but that’s absolutely fine.”

Somehow, Cammish has rarely managed to consistently escape the shadow of Sutton over their four and a bit years at the Alliance squad – then again, who would? But at Oulton, he certainly brought back memories of some of those deeds from his early BTCC days in the Team Dynamics Hondas.

BTCC heads into its seven-week summer break

Photo by: JEP