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Tom Ingram missed out on defending his British Touring Car Championship title having been “beaten by the better team and the better driver” after Ash Sutton left Brands Hatch with the overall spoils.
The performance on the final day was fitting for the season. Ingram’s pace was far better than the field behind him. Unfortunately for him Sutton was always ahead of him. The EXCELR8 Motorsport driver finished as the runner-up in the championship, despite scoring six more points than in his title-winning 2022 season. Even with this being the case Ingram was happy with his performance.
“I think it’s been fairly strong obviously; being honest I think we probably knew what the result was going to be coming into this weekend,” said Ingram to TouringCars.Net. “To try and overturn the advantage that Ash had was going to be a seemingly impossible task but you give it a go nonetheless.
“You keep your head up and try your best. I think we’ve had a valiant effort this weekend. The car felt okay, just not quite up to where those guys are, but that feels quite telling of this season really. It kind of feels like we’ve been close but not quite close enough.
“I don’t think we can feel like we’ve had a disservice done to us this weekend or feel like we’ve been screwed over or anything else like that. We’ve been beaten by the better team and better driver and better car this year so I think we can be very pleased with the results that we’ve got out of it and just look to build on it now from here on in.
“The first two races felt very sort of copy and paste really. It seemed to be Ash and I just focused on each other, there was opportunities but it involved big risks.
“I didn’t want the championship to be decided by something stupid, I’d rather it just go down to a good battle rather than taking someone out.
“I think we can hold our heads high for what we’ve done and what we’ve achieved this year and knowing that actually we’ve worked hard.
“We’ve improved the car over the course of the year, we’ve got closer, just not quite close enough.”