The other new BTCC car rivals should fear

At the halfway point of the 2019 British Touring Car Championship season, Tom Ingram was comfortably one of the star performers. That should come as little in the way of a surprise. He is the reigning independent drivers' champion, and finished runner-up in the standings to title winner Colin Turkington last year.

But ahead of the BTCC's summer hiatus, Ingram was only ninth in the points. He had scored a victory, but it was through the fortune of being drawn on pole for the partially-reversed grid in the Donington Park finale. Otherwise, it's been a difficult birth for the new Toyota GB-supported Corolla since making its debut at the start of the campaign.

The hatchback replacement for the long-serving Avensis saloon has been spectacular to watch, but for all the wrong reasons. A skittish rear axle meant plenty of oversteer, and every extra steering input that Ingram fed into the wheel to control the errant rear end was costing him time. Whether he had to straighten the car mid-corner or correct a slide on exit, with each movement he was extending how far it had to travel an inch at a time.

While it was possible to tighten the leash for a one-shot flying lap in qualifying, managing the car's unpredictable nature throughout a race distance was an altogether more challenging proposition.

But that all changed as the series resumed at Snetterton. Ingram scored pole, albeit by just 0.002 seconds over Dan Cammish - whose Honda Civic Type R was carrying an additional 18kg of success ballast around a circuit that punishes excess weight.

Nonetheless, it was the Corolla model's first pole since double BTCC champion Win Percy, pictured below at Donington, had his Oulton Park success back in 1982. The fact Ingram then converted it into a win by more than three seconds ahead of Cammish is an altogether more worrying prospect for Team Dynamics and Ingram's other rivals.

The Speedworks squad has turned a corner with the Corolla, and it's a safe bet that the new-found pace is here to stay for the rest of the year.

"When you've got a car that's feeling on the edge like the Corolla was during the first part of the season, although it looks fantastic and everyone is watching with bated breath to know what it's going to do, it's not quick," says Ingram.

"That pole lap and win felt easy, it didn't feel stressful, it didn't feel as though it was on the edge, it felt a nice chilled car. I'm a driver that's now happy with it."

Such were the handling deficiencies of the Corolla out of the box, it took until the month-long summer break for the Speedworks team to hit the reset button and to come out fighting.

Originally the plan was to hoist the car up on to a four-poster rig to better understand the alignment settings, with the bump and rebound calibration, in particular, causing a headache.

But that measure was lost to a tight schedule, and so Ingram's engineer Spencer Aldridge undertook the laborious task of raking through every piece of data recorded to find out, on the rare occasion it did harmonise, what made the Corolla tick.

"It's been a huge amount of work that's gone on over the summer break to pull everything together and correlate everything that works and doesn't work," Ingram says.

"A lot of it is a correlation on what we've learned over the year because the stuff that we've tried is ridiculous. You forget, when you've done that much, what worked and what didn't.

"Thankfully, Spencer is insane with the worth ethic he puts in. He's trawled through every single bit of data and every lap that we've done this year - worked out what was better, what wasn't, what worked, what didn't, why it worked, why it didn't - to understand as much as we can."

When the mid-season tyre test at Snetterton rolled around, the two days were spent putting the findings into practice. Set-ups were applied, tried and then revised to find out how Aldridge's research actually performed on track.

In turn, that left no time for Ingram to perform race runs to gather data for the three races at the circuit. As Speedworks team principal Christian Dick adds: "We never did any hero runs to set times, but we were in the top five of the test regardless of what we brought". By contrast, Cammish had relentlessly completed longer runs and so he was better prepped for the first race at the circuit.

"We're still a small team despite the Toyota branding, the Ginsters sponsorship. There's only four of us full-time, and two of those are the owners" Tom Ingram

"Spencer came up with a load of stuff that we wanted to then try at the test and 90% of it didn't work, which is what always happens when you're testing a racecar," Ingram adds. "About 5% of it was 'wow, that's stunning', 2.5% was OK and another 2.5% was pretty good. We ended up with a lot of information to go back with, and it's just a case of going back through and understanding it all."

Ingram was helped in the race by the 2.97-mile layout of the Snetterton 300 circuit. The long green flag lap meant that, as competitors were still arriving at the grid, Cammish was sat stationary and the Civic's temperatures began to rise.

Although he reacted quicker at the lights than Ingram, Cammish's car stuttered in the second phase of its launch and so Ingram maintained track position into Turn 1. Ingram was fortunate in that sense, as an immediate threat to his lead was diminished.

But from there the expected recovery from fellow soft-tyre runner Cammish never materialised. The fact that a comparatively data-poor Speedworks car still romped on to the spoils shows that the newly dialled in Corolla can be super effective.

Race two told a similar story. Across the first half of 2019, the new BMW 330i M Sport has had things pretty much its own way. Thanks to WSR's main drivers - points leader and defending champion Turkington plus 2013 title winner Andrew Jordan - the new car netted nine wins from the first 15 races, seven of which were scored from pole.

Ahead of Snetterton, all non-BMW engine cars were handed a 0.02-bar turbo boost from series organising body TOCA. That 4bhp lift for its competitors was combined with a centre of gravity raise for the 3 Series. Thanks to the return of the similarly rear-wheel-drive Infiniti Q50 into the series, WSR was stung twice when its hand was forced to jack the car's rideheight up by 6mm to bring about parity.

But Turkington and Jordan still posed a serious threat to Ingram. He held them both off admirably until a wastegate glitch killed the Corolla's straightline speed and meant he was powerless to resist Turkington. As the turbo issue worsened, he continued to fall away to an eventual 23rd at the flag.

Then, on the unflavoured hard-tyre in the final race, he recovered the Corolla up to an impressive eighth.

"It's really exciting to see where we've come from over the last few months," says Ingram. "We came to the weekend: FP1 was really good, the car felt fantastic. I looked at making a couple of changes and in FP2 it didn't quite work the way we wanted it to, so we just resorted back to what we did in FP1.

"You always get blinded by the sight of something else, so you end up with a cheetah hunting its prey and chasing just one thing. You lose sight of the fact you're running towards hyenas or running into a bear trap" Tom Ingram

"It just felt phenomenal, absolutely sublime, the best the car has ever felt, the best touring car I've ever driven in that sense. It's much better than the Avensis in the balance, in terms of how it was responding, it felt awesome.

"It did everything you wanted it to and in such a lovely way and in such a balanced way. It didn't feel like you had to hustle the car, grab it by the scruff of the neck and wring it. It was like stepping on to the tee at the first hole in a round of golf, having a gentle swing and it going straight down the middle of the fairway. It just worked.

"I just drove around and it was quick. That's a really nice place for a driver when you can be in that place where the car is doing the work for you. It's exciting moving forward because I think we've taken a huge step.

"We said all the way along, give us until the summer break, and if we're still struggling then people can start criticising us, but until then let us have a fair crack. I think we've now proved the work we've done leading up to this, we've come straight out the box after the summer break and the car feels fantastic."

"So much of it is about having a very good structure and having people who are very passionate about what they do to put it into practice. If you've got somebody who is not really arsed, and just wants to take the pay cheque at the end of each month then go home, you're never going to be quick.

"We're still a small team despite the Toyota branding, the Ginsters sponsorship. There's only four of us full-time, and two of those are the owners. To understand everything that goes in, everyone has to muck in. That's what makes it really gratifying: when the hard work pays off and when you have the results."

Such has been the start for Turkington and Jordan that in truth the fight for the 2019 title is a two-horse race. Even a reinvigorated Corolla will struggle to haul Ingram into true championship contention, but then that's nothing to be sniffed at against the engineering might of WSR and Team Dynamics.

With third 3 Series driver Tom Oliphant added into the picture, WSR has triple the data for each session compared to the one-car Speedworks attack. A 40-minute practice session then returns two hours' worth of information.

Likewise, with Matt Neal, Dynamics has two cars. Add in BTC Racing's Josh Cook and Chris Smiley, and the FK8 Civic is well-accounted for also - not to mention, as it was introduced last year, the car has had an extra year to be honed.

"You start falling into the trap of chasing," says Ingram.

"You always get blinded by the sight of something else, so you end up with a cheetah hunting its prey and chasing just one thing. You lose sight of the fact you're running towards hyenas or running into a bear trap.

"Step back, look around, look at what you've done, at your strengths and weaknesses and just do it in a methodical manner. We've made real progress.

"Now is when we really start to open up the parameters of what we can do. Hopefully, this is going to be the start of a very strong little race car and everyone is going to be a bit fearful of us."

This season Ingram has split his time with racing a 1963 Chevrolet Corvette, so the Corolla's initial oversteer wasn't a culture shock, but nor was it fast. Whereas the Avensis, which has been in use since the inception of the Next Generation Touring Car era, was continuing down a road of diminishing returns, the Corolla opens up a new and expansive development path.

Turkington may have praised the 3 Series for being "the perfect touring car", but he warned that its dominant start to life meant that there was few long-hanging fruits.

By contrast, the Corolla has still some way to go. If not this season, perhaps on that trajectory it can be the car to deliver Ingram his first BTCC crown.