How Sutton shone while Ingram’s luck deserted him at Brands Hatch

Four and a half tenths of a second. It doesn’t sound like much but, on a short 47-second lap around the 1.2-mile Brands Hatch Indy Circuit, that’s usually the difference between pole position and languishing in the midfield. It was the deficit that the Alliance Racing-run NAPA Ford Focus team believed Ash Sutton was facing going into the second weekend of the 2026 British Touring Car Championship.

The four-time champion, in his position as this season’s points leader, headed into Saturday entitled to just one second per lap of TOCA Turbo Boost, activated at a minimum speed of 140km/h, compared to the 20s/105km/h of 14 of his rivals. Among them? Reigning champion Tom Ingram, outside the top seven in the points (and therefore allowed full TTB) following his troubled weekend at Donington Park, but with his Excelr8 Motorsport Hyundai i30 N Fastback looking every bit as fast as it was in 2025.

So, how did Sutton somehow win Saturday’s qualifying race with such a handicap? And how did he convert the resulting pole position for Sunday’s race one into victory while still facing a savage TTB offset? A little bit of luck, some unforecasted rain, a dollop of Sutton brilliance – and that lovely new blue-and-yellow Focus Titanium saloon.

“It’s probably about four tenths,” Sutton mused of his TTB disadvantage on Saturday evening, following his win in the half-points race. “It’s still a chunk that we’re on the back foot of. But we’ve just got the car in a really nice window. The new car is an improvement. It’s got to be. Numbers, physics, everything. We’ve seen an element of performance coming from it and I can only put it down to that.”

To get that win, Sutton admitted that “we had a little bit of Lady Luck on our side”. But even so, for him to have put that Focus on the third row of the grid in qualifying was not only hugely impressive, but also put him in position to make the most of such fortune.

Sutton was already third when Daryl De Leon, gunning for a good weekend on a circuit where the West Surrey Racing BMW 330i M Sport was expected to shine, saw a gap inside race leader Ingram as they approached Graham Hill Bend. The problem was, by the time he got there, the gap was no longer there. Contact was made, elbowing Ingram wide and down to fifth, while De Leon had a wobble and, to his credit, never even entertained the notion of sideswiping Sutton to deter the Ford from coming through.

De Leon was in the wars with Ingram on Saturday - but struggled when the rain arrived on Sunday

Photo by: JEP

“Daryl unfortunately went for a move that was never on, locked up and ended up wiping me out,” grumbled Ingram, who had comfortably topped qualifying, but could make no progress from fifth in this race. “In doing so, I picked up a lot of damage so lost a load of performance. We ended up picking up a load of damage on the left-rear, which just completely hampered all the handling. The whole car just felt horrendous – I lost probably 30 to 40% in terms of grip. Once it’s gone like that, there’s very little you can do.”

“I saw a gap, I went for it,” retorted De Leon. “There was a bit of a touch at the apex, but I felt like I got a bit squeezed. I got to the inside line without gaining an unfair advantage – the racing’s got to be hard but fair, and I think it was 100% fair.”

De Leon was another with a full whack of TTB, and stayed hard on Sutton’s heels right up until the very last corner of the race. Here, he overcooked it at Clearways, teetered agonisingly on the brink of gravel-trap doom, and recovered just in time to beat the pursuing Dan Cammish, Ricky Collard and Ingram to the runner-up position.

“Just a rookie mistake!” the amiable non-rookie laughed nervously. “I got the call that it was the last lap, wanted to win the race, overcooked it, looked down, everything was ‘what’s happening?’, and by that point I was carrying too much speed into the corner. I was ‘keep it on the track, keep it on the track’, and I literally just – my left tyre was probably dipped in the gravel, but I had a big enough gap. Ash said every lap was like qualifying and it was me the same. We were pushing the limit there.”

“Another one where you say, ‘Oh for goodness’ sake’, just from being wrong place, wrong time” Tom Ingram

A shower of rain at the start of race one, and more prolonged wet stuff that suddenly struck for race two – both times with the entire field on slick tyres – effectively removed De Leon from contention on Sunday until he burst through to fourth in the dry finale. That rear-wheel-drive BMW doesn’t agree with such intermediate conditions, after all. And it also threw a massive curveball into everyone else’s fortunes.

There was an early safety car in race one, after a nerf from Cammish had sent fourth-placed Adam Morgan’s Plato Racing Mercedes into the Paddock Hill Bend tyre wall. By the time the recovery crews had completed their toils, the Earth had rotated Brands from under the blackest of the clouds and the track quickly dried – all while Sutton was facing a ferocious attack from Collard’s Excelr8 Hyundai.

The aftermath of the mulleted Hampshireman’s bid to squeeze down the inside at Clearways ironically compromised team-mate Ingram, because Cammish’s Alliance Ford got a run on both of them down the Brabham Straight and dumped the two-time champion to fourth. “Another one where you say, ‘Oh for goodness’ sake’, just from being wrong place, wrong time,” sighed Ingram, although he did eventually come back and grab third place from Cammish when he speared inside the Ford at Paddock.

Ingram suffered a case of the wrong place, wrong time across his Brands Hatch weekend

Photo by: JEP

Collard, the subject of a column later this week, repeatedly came back at Sutton before the maestro began to inch away – and only used one of his four allocated laps of TTB, to the 14 out of 14 from his feisty pursuer. “I was cautious at the start, probably overcautious, hence why we might have looked like a cork in the bottle to some extent,” explained Sutton. “Ricky got me on the deployment front, I got him back just from a mistake he made [at Graham Hill Bend, after Collard had led for half a lap] just from trying to push on a bit early. Once the track came to us and we got temp in the tyre, we could get our head down and get gone.”

Impressively, Ingram’s third place in Sunday’s race one had been earned on the medium-compound Goodyear option tyres, meaning he could go soft for the rest of the day, whereas the sporting regulations compelled Sutton and Collard to run the mediums in the next race. And here, Sutton trumped what Ingram had done on that rubber – and in full-wet conditions to boot.

Collard again showed great bravery, snatching the lead from Sutton at Surtees immediately following an early safety car. Despite their tyre advantage, this duo hung on in a crazy race, in which everyone on softs seemed to be making contact with everyone else. Ingram, who’d come out of his Saturday combat with De Leon into full-on warfare with the Anglo-Filipino’s WSR BMW team-mate Charles Rainford, got onto Sutton’s tail, clipped the Ford at Clearways, then ran wide through the gravel at Paddock.

Now into the mix came Aron Taylor-Smith. The cheerful Dubliner was on soft tyres, and Speedworks Motorsport had gambled on giving his Laser Tools Toyota Corolla GR Sport a set-up that would suit wet weather, after a failed differential had hobbled his first race on Sunday. That – and, no doubt, his decades of experience driving around wet Irish country lanes – brought him from 15th at the safety car, swashbuckling into contention. He left Sutton and Collard like they were standing still. In his sister Speedworks Toyota, albeit on a ‘drier’ set-up, Josh Cook looked set to also demote this duo to complete a 1-2 for the team, only to drop it in the gravel at Paddock.

While Cook recovered to seventh, Taylor-Smith scored his first BTCC win since August 2016. “The team have given me something I can trust,” he bubbled. “I can get it dancing around and not be a passenger anymore.”

“Aron showed some really good pace pre-season, but at Donington it just didn’t really happen for him,” said Taylor-Smith’s engineer Craig Porley, the chap who helped mould Jake Hill from rough diamond into 2024 champion. “Aron did a great job while other people were getting caught up, and when he got by those guys on mediums it was a nice buffer. We wanted to keep him calm, but he was in the groove!”

Taylor-Smith celebrates his first BTCC win since August 2016

The race was red-flagged to an early conclusion when Ingram, who had oscillated back into Rainford’s orbit, finally nudged the BMW into the tyres at Druids – and then the lapped Dan Rowbottom, who’d switched to wet-weather tyres after an early setback, found the door closed on his Plato Mercedes by Sam Osborne, punting the Alliance Ford into the stricken 3 Series.

Ingram’s fourth place, behind Sutton and Collard, gave him fifth on the grid for the finale. And he made an “outrageous” start but got boxed in by the cars in front: “Oh, massively so. I got such a good launch but I just couldn’t do anything with it. I couldn’t get left, so I just had to go straight and the guys in front had a pretty rubbish start.”

From seventh on the grid, meanwhile, Sutton had a monster getaway to the extent that he was challenging polesitter James Dorlin’s Restart Racing Hyundai for the lead around the outside of Paddock. “It was a bit like the Thruxton start from last year all over again, to some extent even better,” he grinned. “We were on the downhill part of the grid so that helped, but I just got a really good launch, got off the clutch early and let her rip.”

"I think we’re fine. I’ve got no worries about lack of pace – it’s just lack of luck more than anything" Tom Ingram

The defence of Dorlin, on medium tyres, kept Sutton at bay, before Ingram speared inside the Ford at Clearways, then around the outside of the Independent Hyundai at Paddock, and after that he was gone. “He came in so hot, and I had to be careful at the same time,” explained Sutton. “Yes, I’m not thinking about the championship, but we don’t want a DNF now. I opened the door and let him have that. He clearly had some pace in the car to go away like he did.”

“Going into Clearways, Ash just left half a gap and I didn’t need a second invitation to fire one down the inside of him,” chirruped Ingram. “I nearly had a massive shunt at Surtees – I just lost the rear on the first flying lap, trying to build a gap. I had a cold right-rear still and ended up nearly firing myself in the trees – that was an excellent way to deploy boost and lose a second and a half in doing so!”

Still, Ingram’s season duck was broken, although Sutton’s second place after a to-and-fro with the Power Maxed Racing Audi A3 Saloon of the ever-impressive Mikey Doble meant only a small dent was made in a points advantage that stood at 47 at the close of play.

“We obviously need to try and recover some lost ground as the season goes through,” mused Ingram. “I think we’re fine. I’ve got no worries about lack of pace – it’s just lack of luck more than anything. Wrong place, wrong time and everything else like that. We’re fast, the last race showed that. I think we’re in a good place; we’ve just got to hopefully get a bit of luck.”

Victory in race three gave Ingram confidence he can hunt down Sutton over the course of the season, having seen the four-time champion build a healthy early lead

Photo by: JEP