How Ingram made his mark on the 2026 BTCC campaign – before going out with a bang

As dominant as Ash Sutton has been in the British Touring Car Championship this season, the series pivots around his ongoing rivalry with Tom Ingram. Unquestionably, the 2022 and 2025 title winner did not deserve the yawning chasm of the 132-point deficit he faced to recently crowned fifth-time champion Sutton going into the final round on the Brands Hatch Grand Prix Circuit.

So it was with great satisfaction that the BTCC cognoscenti watched Ingram drive his Excelr8 Motorsport Hyundai i30 N Fastback to two exquisitely judged victories on this most challenging of circuits – scene of his crowning just 12 months earlier. It appeared that he was seeing out the 2026 season with a bang.

Unfortunately, he ended the campaign with a very different kind of bang. A three-car pinball into Paddock Hill Bend just after the start, with Sam Osborne in the middle, Ingram to the inside and Tom Chilton to the outside, ended with Chilton in the gravel and Excelr8 team-mate Ingram smacking into the barriers. Somehow, as if this were a metaphor for the title-clean-sweep season of his dad’s Alliance Racing-run NAPA Ford Focus Titanium squad, Osborne emerged largely unscathed. Ingram, in pain from the impact, was taken to hospital for a CT scan, but thankfully was back in the paddock after nightfall with a clean bill of health, if somewhat stiff and sore.

“It almost sums up our year as something completely outside our control prevented a good weekend from being a great one!” Ingram surmised. But, leaving aside the shenanigans of that gloves-off, rough-and-ready reversed-grid finale, it was indeed a great sign-off from the season for him.

The signs had been there from the start. Around the high-speed sweeps of the Grand Prix loop on Saturday, the Hyundai had looked superb. Ingram was unflurried, smooth, a quick lap barely perceptible. Sutton and his Ford were dramatic, spectacular, terrific to watch. The tin-top versions of Prost and Villeneuve. Sutton had just one second per lap of TOCA Turbo Boost, but put his Focus on the third row for the qualifying race. Ingram had 3s per lap, and was also on the third row, but was in the tougher group and was 0.258s quicker than Sutton.

Unlike, say, Silverstone last time out, here the negative effect of the TTB deficit could be partially compensated for by the skills of the drivers. “It still has an effect, it’s still worth a big chunk of lap time, but there’s a lot more corners here that allows the likes of me, Tom and Dan [Cammish] etc to extract more from the car, make some of that difference back up,” hypothesised Sutton. He didn’t need to point out that “the car’s been on a bit of a knife-edge all day. It just about paid off in qualifying, I didn’t quite get the best lap out of it, lost the rear on my quickest lap.”

“Yes, I would say so,” agreed Ingram regarding Sutton’s point on the TTB. “It feels like you can compete a little bit easier here than you can at somewhere like Silverstone.”

What neither could do, on Saturday at least, was match the Power Maxed Racing Audi A3 Saloon of end-of-season form man Aiden Moffat. The Scot was unhampered by any TTB restriction, and his full 20s per lap of boost allowed him to beat the standard from the earlier session set by Josh Cook’s Speedworks Motorsport Toyota Corolla GR Sport. That was a good effort from the West Countryman, who was on 9s per lap of TTB.

Moffat was the one to beat on Saturday

Photo by: Jakob Ebrey

Unfortunately for Cook, he was given a shove by Sutton at Druids on the opening lap of the qualifying race. “I think Tom Ingram was in my right rear so I got slightly out of shape on the brakes, and then I just tapped into the back of Josh,” confessed Sutton. “He ran in deep, but I managed to hold up the pack shall we say, and allowed him to slot back in.”

This action had allowed the Excelr8 Hyundais of Ricky Collard and Ingram through to chase Moffat, Ingram getting up to second when he slipped inside his team-mate at Dingle Dell. Thereafter he stayed never far away from Moffat, although the TTB offset was never going to allow him to realistically challenge, and the recovering Cook was close behind in third.

Collard had slipped briefly into the gravel at Paddock, dropping him behind Sutton and Mikey Doble’s PMR Audi. This battle resolved itself when Doble’s TTB surplus allowed him to power past the new champion onto the GP loop. Collard attempted to follow him through, but contact with an aggressive Sutton led to him falling back in behind, as a prelude to what would happen the following day…

“They’ve kind of ruined that corner there" Ash Sutton on a sensor at Sheene Curve

Collard got fifth place anyway, because Sutton was penalised 5s for accumulated track-limits penalties, dropping him to 11th in the results – and on the grid for Sunday’s opener. Two of his breaches were at a new sensor that, for some reason, has been installed by the fun police at the inside of Sheene Curve. Who wants to see touring cars attacking here? Everyone with a soul. “They’ve kind of ruined that corner there,” concluded Sutton. “It’s a shame but that’s what we’re dealt with.” Super Touring legend John Cleland was probably crying into his glass of malt whisky while watching on the TV.

The unintended consequence here was that we got what everyone does love to see on a BTCC Sunday: Sutton charging back into contention. In race one, he carried the Ford up to fifth, albeit overshadowed by the action at the front.

Poleman Moffat and front-row-partner Ingram were the only two drivers to use the soft option tyres in this race, and it appeared that the race would revolve around this pair. Ingram had two laps of TTB to the maximum 10 of Moffat, and he judged the race absolutely beautifully. The Hyundai got the best start to move into the lead, before the Audi went through into Westfield on the third lap. No point fighting now, thought Ingram; not when there are still 12 laps to go and the TTB offset still so large.

He kept shadowing until, with five laps remaining, it was time to attack. A glance on the outside of Westfield, a peek around the outside of Stirling’s, under the bridge back into the amphitheatre and… surely not around the outside at Clearways? To the credit of Moffat on the inside, the two got through cleanly, but the Scot appeared to be accelerating back ahead when a stab of TTB from Ingram propelled him back alongside and into the lead.

Tom Ingram takes the chequered flag in race one

Photo by: Jakob Ebrey

“The car was absolutely mega,” grinned Ingram. “The fight with Aiden is what the BTCC is all about as it was hard but fair racing that I really enjoyed, and to come out of a battle like that was particularly pleasing, especially given the different levels of TTB we had.”

Meanwhile, hovering around behind was Cook – on medium tyres. The Toyota, as seems to be a Speedworks tradition, has looked particularly strong towards the end of the season and even set fastest lap. When notification came through with three laps remaining that Moffat had copped a 5s penalty for track limits, that put Cook up to second, while Collard also narrowly got into Moffat’s penalty window to take third.

Now Ingram, Cook and Collard would be compelled to run medium tyres in race two, but so too by choice did fourth and fifth men Moffat and Sutton. The soft/medium offset clearly was not particularly great at Brands, so we were unlikely to see anyone bursting through from further down the grid on preferable rubber. The highest-placed starter on the softs was Doble in sixth, and his main target was wrapping up what has been a hard-fought Independents’ crown.

This was an easier race for Ingram, who never used the single lap of TTB to which he was entitled this time out. Cook had two laps of boost, and his final-tour usage closed the gap to an unrealistically close 0.600s at the finish. “Further indication of the pace we’ve had all season but – for whatever reason – we haven’t been able to show,” mused a vindicated Ingram. “It was a really nice first few laps,” offered Cook. “It was just a good old-school touring car punching-the-laps-in until we started to get track-limits warnings and we had to calm it down a bit.”

Sutton had to pass Collard in spectacular style at Paddock and fend off the soft-tyred West Surrey Racing BMW 330i M Sport of Daryl De Leon to complete the podium. Remarkably, it was his first third place of the season, although there have been just the 20 firsts and seconds… Doble also scampered past Indie class rival De Leon on the final lap to clinch the title in style.

All that remained was the final crashfest. Thankfully, talk of everyone being allowed to run on maximum TTB, should all the various titles be decided, did not come to pass. Such a move would have been brutally unfair upon, for example, reversed-grid polesitter Dexter Patterson, armed with the full 10 laps of boost in his PMR Audi.

The young Scot did a great job and brought it home fourth on the road, third in the results after on-the-road winner Collard was given a 5s penalty after the race for not maintaining a steady pace before the restart after a second safety-car period. This had caused pandemonium among the pursuing pack, with the remarkable result that a) no one hit each other and b) they somehow kept position.

Collard lost his win in race three after a penalty following a chaotic restart

Photo by: Jakob Ebrey

At this point, Sutton was down in seventh, after being edged off the track on the run from Hawthorns to Westfield as he tried to deprive Collard of the lead.

“It’s no different to what happened with me and him yesterday,” chipped Collard in reference to their qualifying race incident. “There was clearly not enough of an overlap. It was definitely a proper old-school scrap, and I think that’s what the fans want to see. I was giving it my absolute all and then some.”

“Ricky’s a hard touring car racer,” observed Sutton. “He’s a bit like his old man – a chip off the old block. I love racing Ricky, he’s a phenomenal racer. It was just maybe a fraction too much from my side. Going from the full left-hand side of the circuit all the way to the right, I didn’t have a choice of what was going on. We had the overlap, unfortunately we got to the grass, luckily we kept it out of the wall, but we still came charging back through.”

“Ricky’s a hard touring car racer. He’s a bit like his old man – a chip off the old block" Ash Sutton on Ricky Collard

Sutton had already survived an inadvertent nerf from team-mate Cammish at Graham Hill Bend on the opening lap – “It was a big save! We had a bit of damage off the back of that, which was a shame” – but managed to storm back following the Collard incident, once the water temperature had stabilised following his wild ride along the grass. On the final lap he passed Cammish for what would have been the win, but was now out of TTB, and the Yorkshireman used his final burst to slip back ahead as they headed onto the GP loop.

“He got me fair and square,” shrugged Sutton. “I was just trying to get back to Ricky. I wanted that race win, I had the bit between my teeth.”

“We’re certainly not as quick as we were here last year, and that was quite rough,” related Cammish of what had hitherto been a tough weekend. “Bit of a lack of sparkle. But soft tyre and a bit of boost at the end…”

And so we were back to 2026 normality. An Alliance Ford 1-2; despair for the Excelr8 Hyundai camp. But within days, this will all be history and a new Sutton-versus-Ingram chapter will begin to be written.

At the end of it all, Sutton earned his place in the BTCC history books

Photo by: Jakob Ebrey