How Ingram's clean slate can end his BTCC title wait

“Naturally as human beings, we don’t really like change, and I’m no different to that,” ponders Tom Ingram. “I was comfortable, I knew what I was getting, we all knew how each other worked, so of course it was a weird one to have to make the decision to say, ‘I’m not driving for Speedworks anymore.’”

Ingram’s departure, along with that of engineer Spencer Aldridge, from Speedworks Motorsport was one of the headline moments from the 2020-21 British Touring Car Championship ‘silly season’, which turned out to be one of the silliest for years. Both had grown with the Cheshire team – Ingram over the first seven years of his BTCC career, firstly in the Toyota Avensis and then the Corolla; Aldridge in his rise from the junior staffer to his role as technical chief.

In a sense, their departure for the Excelr8 Motorsport Hyundai squad was like two brothers leaving the family home (with Speedworks chiefs Christian and Amy Dick as mum and dad), and striking out together to find new digs.

“There’s that old cliche of everything good comes to an end at some point, and I think that is true in this case, in the sense that we had seven great years together and it was really cool, because we all grew at the same points,” continues Ingram.

“Christian won’t mind me saying it, but when I joined Speedworks they were a mid-pack team, and at that point I was completely unproven – I’d never raced in touring cars before. So for us actually to grow together and get our first fastest lap, get our first podium, get our first pole position, get our first win, our first independents’ championship, it was nice to have been able to do that.

“Of course it would have been nice to sign that off with an overall championship. We came bloody close, but unfortunately people don’t remember the guys who came close [closest in 2018]. It was a hard one to close the door on.”

Tom Ingram, BTCC Brands Indy 2020

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

The reasons for the move to Excelr8 were entirely commercially driven. Lest we forget, in Speedworks’ maiden season with official Toyota GB support and the new Corolla, Ingram headed to the 2019 finale with an outside mathematical shot at the crown. In 2020, he was a slightly more realistic outsider, and arguably could have wrestled it from under the noses of main protagonists Ash Sutton and Colin Turkington had it not been for a broken front wishbone in qualifying for the October Croft round, which caused the Toyota to fail the ride-height test, cost pole position, and banished Ingram to the back of the grid.

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While this was going on, Speedworks was further cementing its relationship with Toyota for 2021, which would mean the Corollas sporting a livery bearing allegiance to the marque’s Toyota Gazoo Racing activities. That didn’t – and couldn’t – fit with Ingram’s obligations.

In this day and age, unlike the 1990s Super Touring peak, BTCC drivers cannot hope to make a living from being paid by a manufacturer. The ideal is therefore to put together your own commercial package, build around yourself that awful business buzzword of a ‘brand’, from which you earn your income. Jason Plato is the master of this, and his methods became an inspiration to the young Ingram from his Ginetta GT4 Supercup days, when he was a member of the KX Akademy that Plato mentored. For Ingram now, his commercial partners are pasty giant Ginsters and Hansford Sensors.

"We haven’t left with a slam of the door and a ‘screw you’ and plant pots being thrown. We’re still good mates, we still talk" Tom Ingram

“One of the things I learned fairly early on was to get that established,” says Ingram. “It makes everything easier – you know how to come across, you know how to speak, the tone of voice that you need to use. Nothing’s ever awkward, nothing’s ever wrong, because you’re using what you have as your brand and that gives you a bit of stability.

“It literally just came down to the commercial stuff [with Speedworks]. We had done our deal with Ginsters, with Hansford Sensors, and at the same time Christian had done his deal with Toyota, and it all just reached a head at the same point.

“We didn’t fall out. It was just a case of we’d been renewing our contracts, and we were happy to have what we had the years previous – we pretty much had 80 or 90 per cent of the car. And then all of a sudden Christian would then need it as well, and rather than try to shoehorn everything in and make it look like a patchwork quilt and nobody get what they paid for, at that point it was better to step away.

“We haven’t left with a slam of the door and a ‘screw you’ and plant pots being thrown. We’re still good mates, we still talk. If the MotoGP’s on we’re still texting away ‘who’s going to win it?’ By no means have we fallen out. Unfortunately, it’s where the commercials of the sport have taken us.”

Tom Ingram, BTCC 2020

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

And so Ingram arrived at Excelr8, a team that it’s probably fair to say is yet to prove itself in the BTCC, but with which he already had a relationship from two years of coaching its drivers in the Mini Challenge.

“I’ve always kept an eye on them out of curiosity just to see what was going on,” Ingram points out. “Genuinely they did impress me last year – straight out of the box at media day last year the Hyundais looked cool, the garage looked great, all the boys and girls that worked for them pulled together well. So it made one of my decisions easier, that I’d seen what they’d done and they just needed a little bit of direction, and I think that’s where Spencer and I have been able to come in and say, ‘Right, we’re going this way.’”

The winter of 2020-21 was always going to be a point where Excelr8 pushed ahead anyway. The team’s maiden BTCC season, 2019, was a case of getting a foothold with the old MG6 machinery it had acquired. For 2020, the Hyundai i30 N Fastback was produced for the new driver line-up of Senna Proctor and Chris Smiley, with top BTCC engineer Kevin Berry heavily involved in the technical leadership.

But with the coronavirus lockdown hitting in March, development took a hit. And when racing finally took place, Berry’s main commitments to the Cyan Racing Lynk & Co World Touring Car Cup team meant that he was rarely in attendance at BTCC events – it wasn’t just down to clashing dates, but also quarantine requirements either side of the WTCR rounds.

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So with Smiley staying on, along with two extra cars (for Jack Butel and Rick Parfitt Jr) thanks to Excelr8’s absorption of new partner Trade Price Cars’ two TBL entrants’ licences, it would be logical that Ingram and Aldridge lead the way on direction.

“I think it’s worked really well so far,” enthuses Ingram. “We’re yet to see that properly in action because we haven’t done a race weekend. But so far Spencer and I have settled in really well. After our first test, ‘Spenny’ and I spent a few hours on the phone going through bits and pieces, and it feels like we’ve been here forever almost.

“For me, one of the most critical parts is the driver-engineer relationship. If you’ve got a very good driver-engineer relationship, everything else will naturally forge around that. If you don’t have that, then everything is having to settle into place at the same time.

Tom Ingram, BTCC 2021 ExcelR8 test

Photo by: Jakob Ebrey

“The engineer has to trust the driver, the driver has to trust the engineer, the engineer has to trust the mechanics, the mechanics have to trust the engineer. And if the engineer’s going, ‘Well I don’t trust what the driver’s saying,’ then the mechanics don’t have the trust either. So from Spencer’s and my own point of view it seems to have gone really well.

“The team have welcomed us with open arms, Spencer’s been given pretty much free rein to say, ‘We’d like to do this, that can wait’. He’s done so much to the car over the winter he’s almost redesigned it and started again to all intents and purposes. He’s done an amazing job, and the good thing is we’re not trying to make it a Toyota Corolla; we’re not trying to make it a Toyota Avensis; we’re making a Hyundai i30 N Fastback even better. We’re using what we know, but we’re also using what we know has already been good on the car.

“All the circuits we’ve gone to, we’ve been quicker than the Toyota, and Chris has jumped in the car and gone, ‘Bloody hell, this feels amazing.’ So it’s all looking good, but until we get that first qualifying out of the way at Thruxton [scene of next week’s opening round], obviously we don’t know.”

"We’ve almost created a hybrid between what clearly worked very well for the Toyota last year, and what worked well in the Hyundai last year. Each car naturally has its own quirks, and things that work a little bit better" Tom Ingram

Interestingly, the Toyota Corolla that Ingram used to race always looked like a roller-skate out on track, albeit loose at the rear, a paradox of a front-wheel-drive car that looked truly alive; the new-for-2020 Hyundai i30 Ns appeared quite lurchy, with massive commitment from Proctor and Smiley frequently launching them up onto two wheels. What didn’t help was the COVID lockdown pre-season and then the non-stop run of race weekends.

Ingram explains: “They couldn’t develop the car on circuit because you couldn’t get out anywhere. Everything was done on Saturday mornings [in free practice], so they were on the fly, they were learning all the time, and it is difficult when you’re doing your testing in public to get it right first time.

“We know that they are tricky things to set up and get the most out of, and when you’re not in the optimal window, then you struggle, and competing against teams that had already done their winter testing the year previous, and already had a baseline set-up for the cars, well of course they were always going to be on the back foot.”

So are Ingram and Aldridge going to move towards a Corolla set-up, or would the i30 move that way anyway with some development? “We can’t not know what we know from the Toyota,” states Ingram, “but we’ve not bolted on the same set-up at all. We’ve almost created a hybrid between what clearly worked very well for the Toyota last year, and what worked well in the Hyundai last year. Each car naturally has its own quirks, and things that work a little bit better. It’s a little bit longer, and there’s a little bit more weight across the rear.

Tom Ingram, BTCC 2020

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

“To say ‘this is how an NGTC car has to be set up’ is very difficult. You can’t take the set-up from a [Honda Civic] FK2 and stick it onto an FK8, because the wheelbase is different, the overhangs are different, the centre of gravity is different, so you have to work with what you’ve got.

“With the data that we had from the first year of the Hyundai, actually it made Spencer’s job a little easier to go through everything and go, ‘Well, this clearly worked, that didn’t, this worked for us, that didn’t work for us,’ so actually we’ve almost created an amalgamation of years of work from the Toyota and the foundations that they had with the Hyundai.”

That longer wheelbase comes with the Hyundai being a Fastback, as opposed to the hatches that are so common in the BTCC (including the Corolla).

“I think the benefits straight off the bat are the shape of the Hyundai,” says Ingram. “If we can get the car to be as good as the Corolla was through the corners, we can’t not win a little bit back here or there with the slightly better shape. We know that we were lacking a little bit of that with the Corolla. When you look at the BMW 3-series, which is a saloon, compared to a very boxy hatchback, you can’t not lose time in a straight line.

“So now we’ve won a little bit of the shape back; we’re almost back to being Avensisey – if that’s even a word! – in terms of our straight-line performance. Then the compromise comes from having a longer wheelbase, but then you get the better stability, so there’s trade-offs for both.

“At the moment, the benefit is that we’ve got the strong front-end performance, which is exactly what you need in a touring car, and we’ve got a car that gives you an enormous amount of feel across the rear, which I really like. Places like Thruxton [where Ingram won twice in 2020], I’m hoping that we can be stronger than we were with the Corolla, which is great, but I’ve got to wait for that to be proved!”

Testing has indeed gone well, and Ingram and the Hyundai looked strong at the Silverstone media day running. The highlight times are a bit dodgy on a four-cornered track where you never know who’s running what weight (Ingram refers to it as a “dick-waving exercise”), but there was the Hyundai in fourth place. Then look into it a bit further, and he’s just a tiny fraction from the quickest on top 10 and 20-lap averages across the day – a far more representative illustration of pace, because it minimises the effect of those soft or new-tyred, lightweight outliers.

Tom Ingram, BTCC 2021 Silverstone media day

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

But surely it’s too early for someone who’s not yet (quite) won a BTCC title to fight for the 2021 crown with a team that is realistically entering only its second year as a serious proposition in the series… Is it a case of ‘build this year, attack next’?

"When you say, ‘We’re going for the title, this is what we’re doing’, it focuses everybody’s attention and we know that we want to have the car roll out at every single test, every single race, in the best shape possible" Tom Ingram

“We’ve done a two-year deal straight off the bat, which is great for both of us,” says Ingram. “But I’d be shooting myself in the foot if I said I wasn’t interested in going for the title. Of I am. I wouldn’t want to discount us if I’m brutally honest.

“We’ve done a lot of work, and all of the boys and girls at Excelr8 are really on side with understanding how Spencer and I work, and how we get the best out of people and the car. By no means am I saying I’m never going to make a mistake, of course I am, but we’re all learning together. And I think when you’ve actually got a strong goal, it makes everybody work harder.

“If you just look at it and say, ‘Well, a top 10 would be nice’, everything just becomes a bit wishy-washy. Whereas when you say, ‘We’re going for the title, this is what we’re doing’, it focuses everybody’s attention and we know that we want to have the car roll out at every single test, every single race, in the best shape possible, looking as good as possible, and being as quick as possible. It makes everybody including myself knuckle down and work even harder.”

Tom Ingram, BTCC 2021 Silverstone media day

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images