Tom Ingram admitted he is hopeful that he can repeat his pole position at Brands Hatch a fortnight ago after a strong showing in the second free practice session of the weekend in the Dunlop MSA British Touring Car Championship meeting at Donington Park.
Ingram, who went on to claim both his and Speedworks’ first race victory on 3rd April from that pole position, clocked the third fastest time in another forty minute, red-flag disrupted session, with a best time of 1:10.377, 0.248 seconds adrift of pace-setter Josh Cook.
Speaking after the session, Ingram remains hopeful that the pace can be found in his Toyota Avensis and that he can take the challenge to the usual suspects, of which he is fast becoming one, in this afternoons qualifying session.
“It was really strong,” summarised the High Wycombe racer.
“I’m feeling very hopeful just looking at the times. Everyone’s done their times right at the end on new tyres and we did ours on 25 lap old tyres so promising so far. We know the pace is going to come massively down for qualifying – another four-five tenths at least so I’m almost certain we’ve got more time to find, as has everybody else.”
Ingram was also pleased with how the car responded to changes made to the engineering setup across the forty minutes, which bodes well as they make their final preparations ahead of qualifying.
“The car felt very good. We were making quite a few changes throughout the session and it seemed to respond very well so we’ll see.”
As always in the BTCC, success ballast is a factor in deciding the starting order for the first race tomorrow, but with one of the lightest loads on board Ingram believes the session is set to be an interesting one, from a personal point of view.
“We’ve got the best part 15kgs of ballast. We’ve got some in there but not a huge amount so performance wise it shouldn’t affect us anywhere near as much as the guys at the front of the championship. It should be fairly interesting. We want to try what we did at Brands. We know it’ll be difficult but hey, we’ll give it a good shot – you never know.”