Speedworks Motorsport’s Tom Ingram admits that his Donington Park weekend in the British Touring Car Championship was one of ‘damage limitation’ after three ‘aggressive’ races.
Ingram scored a brace of tenth-placed finishes in the first two races of the day, before being excluded from 13th in the final race of the day due to having been adjudged to have caused a collision with Rob Austin. Ingram was earlier in the race involved in an incident caused by Fabrizio Giovanardi – for which the Italian was later penalised – that pushed the Speedworks driver off the circuit just before the safety car came out.
Both of the first two races had been held in particularly tricky conditions, with rain passing over the Donington Park circuit shortly beforehand. Ingram kept his cool to score yet more points in his first wet touring car races, moving the 20-year-old up to tenth overall in the championship.
With results not quite as strong as in his Brands Hatch début weekend, Ingram admits that the weekend was about damage limitation due to a number of incidents with other drivers, and continuing along the learning curve of being a new touring car driver.
“It’s been a learning curve again, moving on from Brands to this weekend,” said Ingram to TouringCars.Net. “I think as a driver I’ve got stronger in a touring car, but we’ve just been very, very unlucky with the incidents we’ve had.
“We had huge damage under the safety car, when we had a driver slamming into the back of us in race two. In race three we got taken out as the safety car was deployed and that ruined our race and it was playing catch up from there. I think the weekend has been damage limitation – to make the best of a bad situation.”
Ingram admits that whilst he is pleased to have made progress into the top ten in the championship he still sees plenty of work to do for the rest of the season, feeling that he could have scored higher but for the incident with Giovanardi.
“We’ve moved up a place in the championship so we’re now tenth which is good,” added Ingram. “But what it does mean is that we’ve still got a lot of work to do. The package that we’ve put together here at Speedworks has been really, really strong. It just goes to show that we’ve got ourselves a nice baseline setup and we’ve got work to around that.”
“I’ve always been looking at comparing myself against the others and I’m the top rookie as well, which is another nice feather in the cap. But at the same time we know that there’s still more to come – it’s going to take a little bit of time to still get more from myself, because it’s still my BTCC début. There’s more to come from myself, there’s more to come from the car and I can’t wait for the rest of the season.”