How Ingram's new wingman is a BTCC ace reborn

The British Touring Car Championship sporting regulations have a lot to answer for. The combination of TOCA Turbo Boost reductions for the most successful drivers combined with the soft/hard tyre format of the opening three rounds have thrown up the unlikely scenario whereby Tom Ingram remains a title favourite, despite not having won a single race.

In fact Ingram, who sits 15 points behind table-topper Ash Sutton, has long been beaten to the honour of the Excelr8 Motorsport Hyundai team’s first race win of 2025: that was the evergreen veteran Tom Chilton at the opening round in Donington Park.

And over the past two race weekends at Brands Hatch and Snetterton, it’s been a third member of the Excelr8 squad who has come closest to a victory.

It’s fair to say that Adam Morgan’s stock as a BTCC frontrunner fell away slightly during his four years behind the wheel of BMW machinery from 2021-24. But, equally, it’s easy to forget that up to 2020 he was squeezing fantastic results out of the family Ciceley Motorsport team’s ageing Mercedes A Class.

Thanks to his own background – he initially emulated his father Russell by driving rally cars and earned his BTCC break with a free drive for winning the 2011 Ginetta GT Supercup – the Morgans were seduced by the idea of a rear-wheel-drive touring car being the final step in cracking the code to being a title contender. But that proved a red herring. It might be a brave thing for a down-to-earth, dyed-in-the-wool Lancastrian to say, but – and whisper this sotto voce – he prefers those namby pamby front-wheel-drive cars.

Morgan’s return to competitiveness in 2025 has been welcomed throughout the paddock. Once his two years at West Surrey Racing – his deal here was partly amortised by a return of the WSR-built BMWs acquired by Ciceley for 2021 – had run its course, it is understood that the family was close to ending its 13-season BTCC adventure.

That would have been a shame, because he is renowned as one of the most downright pleasant blokes in the series. He’s not an extrovert like Chilton, or a social media and video ever-present like Ingram. Morgan just loves things with engines – and driving them quickly – as well as his family and his friends. When he’s not racing, he’s working with his dad’s commercial trucks business in Blackburn.

After some tough years, strong results have now returned for Morgan

Photo by: JEP

In a way, he belongs more in an era when what became the BTCC was largely populated by garage owners, who spent their weekends hurling around Group 2 Escorts or Group 1 Capris. On the proviso that they were rear-wheel-drive, of course…

“I feel comfortable letting the car move around underneath me, and I’m particularly loving qualifying, just having those stabs at four new [tyres], four new, four new, and being able to push and push and push,” enthuses Morgan of his early weekends with the Hyundai.

“I don’t know what it is. Maybe the eight, nine years of the Mercedes, it’s just been ingrained into me. It feels normal to me, like a second nature. I’m just loving it.”

“I’ve spent four years in a rear-wheel-drive being petrified of the brake pedal” Adam Morgan

The Hyundai is one of the more visibly ‘active’ cars, perhaps a knock-on effect of lead driver Ingram’s style, where he is clearly comfortable having the back end well out of line on corner entry while hitting the apex with pinpoint accuracy. Not so the BMW…

“The thing with the BMW, as soon as it starts to move, you have to back out, you have to control the slide, back out the throttle and drive away,” adds Morgan. “But as this [the Hyundai] is moving around you manage it by using the throttle, so you don’t lose as much time as you do in a rear-wheel-drive car.”

After a false start with a track-limits fiasco at Donington, Morgan has qualified well: third at Brands, fifth at Snetterton. Excelr8 insiders say that in his first day in the car, a March test at Brands, he was too cautious on the brakes, but the next time out at Snetterton the following week he had it nailed. Now he looks like one of the latest on the anchors…

“I’ve spent four years in a rear-wheel-drive being petrified of the brake pedal, locking an inside front or flat-spotted tyres, because there’s no diff on the front, you haven’t got the same weight change when you hit the brake pedal,” he explains. “So it’s taken me a little while to adjust to how hard you can hit the brake pedal in a front-wheel-drive car.

Morgan was at the wheel of a BMW in 2023

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

“It took me a bit to find the limit, and we’re getting there. There’s still improvements in places, but it’s nice to get to a braking point and just smack the brakes as hard as you can and know you can get away with it, and that’s given me so much confidence to push that and hopefully try and match the two Toms.”

As we chat, Chilton is standing close by in the Excelr8 truck, chucking in the occasional wry interjection. They were team-mates in the Ciceley BMW line-up in 2021, and are clearly pals.

“It just feels like a happy place,” smiles Morgan. “I’m really happy with the team, and working with the two Toms is mega. In this team you have such a laugh. You have a 10, 15-minute debrief and then you’re in the back of the truck talking absolute nonsense. Honestly it’s ridiculous! And I think it’s that kind of atmosphere that really helps me.”

The inference here is that the WSR way was not for Morgan. This is a team created in the image of founder and principal Dick Bennetts, known as ‘The Guru’ in his F3 days, and where the lengthy debrief is king. In recent years this has worked for title winners Colin Turkington and Jake Hill. But… horses for courses and all that, although Morgan is quick to point out: “It’s not like I didn’t enjoy it last year, but this is on another level.”

Ingram, too, is fond of the red-headed Blackburn man. Back in 2011, when Morgan was winning that Ginetta G55 title, Ingram was crowned in the sub-class for the older G50 model before claiming the G55 crown – and his own identical BTCC entry to Morgan’s two years earlier – in 2013.

“It’s been really nice to watch him have effectively what he should have had before, which is the good results and the fast pace out of it,” declares Ingram. “Because Adam’s really fast – he’s a really good driver.

“His work ethic’s really inspirational as well, when you watch him in the back of the truck, how he speaks with people. It’s really interesting to watch how he works. I’ve known Adam forever and we’ve always got on really well, so it’s nice to have somebody in the team that is a mate as well, and we just have a laugh. Genuinely, it’s really nice, really enjoyable.”

Ingram has been full of praise for his new team-mate

Photo by: JEP

The good thing is that the mild-mannered (out of the car, anyway) Morgan’s presence in the Excelr8 line-up perfectly complements the guys who were already there.

“He’s a joy to have in the team,” continues Ingram. “He’s fitted in straight away and gets our humour, gets how we work, but equally gets how when it’s time to knuckle down we can all do that. And also he works really well with us as a team – the feedback that we all share, I can trust Adam’s as much as he’ll trust mine and we’ll trust Tom’s. From three drivers, you can’t really ask for any more.

“He’s a really good asset to the team and a genuinely really nice bloke to have around as well.”

As the chat with Morgan draws to a close, Chilton listening with amusement, Ingram arrives carrying home-baked cookies presented to him by a BTCC fan. The chit-chat moves onto confectionary, three very nice chaps with an eye-watering 1237 BTCC starts between them just being blokes

Morgan, then, is a BTCC ace reborn. “We gave it a go,” he muses of his BMW years. “I joined the best rear-wheel-drive team in WSR, so I had every opportunity, but for some reason it didn’t really come together for me. I don’t really know why. It was a very different atmosphere for me moving from Ciceley to WSR. My team-mates were also very quick. But I feel so much more at home with the car now, how it behaves and what it does.

“When we signed the contract with Excelr8, I then asked for the set-up of Tom and Tom. And the set-up from Tom Ingram, I compared it to the Mercedes set-up – it was many years ago but it was similar, and I said, ‘I want to follow that, that’s what I used to drive in'. It’s taken me a few goes to get at it. Tom has it quite twitchy, quite nervous; I have pulled it back a bit from there, but I think overall that is the fastest set-up. It’s a bit like riding a bike.”

As the chat with Morgan draws to a close, Chilton listening with amusement, Ingram arrives carrying some home-baked cookies presented to him by a BTCC fan. The chit-chat naturally moves onto confectionary, three very nice chaps with an eye-watering 1237 BTCC race starts between them (Ingram is the least experienced on 336!) just being blokes.

I take my leave. Ingram has proffered a cookie, but there’s a slice of Mrs Simmons’s delicious home-made Victoria sponge calling. A few hours later, Morgan will fall short by just 0.355 seconds in his bid to beat Dan Rowbottom to a first victory of 2025. That’s two consecutive rounds where he’s taken a runner-up spot.

That breakthrough first victory of the season – ending a drought that dates back to May 2022 – will surely not take long to notch up. And it could even come before title chaser Ingram breaks his own duck.

Morgan enjoyed some rare BMW success at Thruxton in 2022, and is now seeking more wins

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images