Tom Ingram says his plan at Knockhill had always been centred around targeting a race three win, which is exactly what the Excelr8 Motorsport driver achieved in Sunday’s final British Touring Car Championship race.
Carrying the second heaviest car into the meeting by virtue of being second in the drivers’ standings, Ingram faced a tough task in Scotland to fight at the front from the off.
The Hyundai driver qualified in ninth for the first race, and although he slipped to tenth in the opening race, his weekend progressively improved over the course of Sunday.
Shedding weight for race two, Ingram hauled himself up to sixth in that race, which in turn gave him fourth on the grid for the reversed-grid final race.
Immediately jumping up to third at the start, Ingram dispatched Jason Plato for second a few laps after the restart from a safety car phase and set about closing the gap to Team BMW’s race leader, Stephen Jelley.
On lap 17 he pulled a superb late move into the hairpin, getting up the inside of the BMW driver with a decisive, clean pass.
From there, Ingram pulled gradually clear and claimed his third win of the season, also minimising the ground lost in the championship battle to Ash Sutton, with Ingram remaining second overall albeit with a slightly increased deficit after he lost nine points to his main rival.
“It was our masterplan,” said Ingram. “We had the conversation before that third race that what we did today was what we tried to do at Oulton. It worked a bit better this weekend.
“I’m so, so happy. It’s so nice to do it around a circuit like this as well, where the adrenaline is pumping and everything feels alive – you come in shaking and it’s a hell of an experience to be able to drive, and so nice to be able to do it in front of a load of fans here at Knockhill, it’s just awesome.
“I’d sort of read him [Jelley] a couple of laps previously; I could see that I was a little bit better on the brakes into the final hairpin.
“I probably had a chance to do it three or four times, but I thought ‘I’ve only got one opportunity to do this’.
“On the lap previous I just looked to see what he did – I didn’t move too much, just to see if he’d defend it, and then open it up and he did, so I thought I don’t need a second invitation.
“It felt a little bit like Brands Hatch all over again with Tom [Oliphant]. For the race lead, into the final hairpin with a good few laps left of the race to go as well, I wasn’t going to leave that one there.”
Ingram also explained that he had won the race despite an issue with his car which was costing him some performance.
“We had a couple of electrical gremlins, so I lost my flat shift. We have a sequential gearbox in the car and what happens is as you pull the gear level it just for a split second cuts the ignition to allow the next gear to go in, and that wasn’t working, so I was having to lift off.
“It doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you’re refining things to a thousandth of a second to get the gear cut, it makes a big difference!
“I was getting alarms coming up on the dash saying ‘low fuel pressure, high fuel pressure, low fuel pressure’, so something’s got into the mix that doesn’t like being in there.
“I was contemplating a full master off and master on again if we had a safety car, but I’m glad we didn’t.”