Ingram ‘incredibly proud’ after going down fighting in Brands Hatch decider

• Team Bristol Street Motors star falls just short after epic final weekend performance
• 33rd career victory sees former champion take title battle right down to the wire
• EXCELR8 ace vows to come back ‘even stronger’ in 2025 in quest to reclaim crown

There was no fairytale ending for Tom Ingram in the 2024 British Touring Car Championship finale at Brands Hatch last weekend (5-6 October), but the former champion went down fighting with a characteristically heroic performance as circumstances cruelly conspired against him.
 
With a dead-heat at the summit of the standings, Ingram headed into the weekend – his eighth consecutive title tilt in the UK’s premier motor racing series – predicting a ‘bare-knuckle fist fight’ for honours, but he could not have predicted how quickly it would turn so physical.
 
After pulling a scintillating lap out of the bag in qualifying to line up on the front row of the grid amongst the 20 high-calibre contenders – a scant 0.036 seconds shy of pole position and four spots ahead of chief rival Jake Hill – his challenge suffered an early blow mere moments into the curtain-raising contest in Kent.

As the pack sped towards Druids for the first time, the talented Bucks-born ace found himself collateral damage when the pursuing Josh Cook lost control and speared into Ash Sutton, with the latter in-turn collecting Ingram’s Hyundai i30N.
 
Fortunately, the 2022 title-winner was able to continue, albeit down in ninth place, from where he dug deep. Belying the equal-lowest hybrid allocation in the field – by dint of his championship position – he scythed spectacularly back through to third, pulling off some ultra-committed passes in the process and posting fastest lap to secure an additional championship point.
 
The immovable object was Hill’s team-mate Colin Turkington in second, with the four-time champion drawing upon all of his extensive experience and extra hybrid to determinedly keep Ingram at bay. The Team Bristol Street Motors star duly went into race two five points adrift of the top of the table – but it was a deficit that he all-but eroded courtesy of an even more impressive drive than in the opener.
 
Immediately going on the attack in front of the live ITV4 television cameras and a capacity trackside crowd, Ingram swept boldly around the outside of Turkington through high-speed Hawthorns – in fifth gear and on semi-cold tyres – before exploiting the narrowest of gaps to fire his Hyundai down the inside of Hill into Paddock Hill Bend to seize the initiative at the beginning of lap two, thereafter never looking back.
 
His 33^rd career triumph was inarguably one of his finest, and allied to another fastest lap – his tenth from 30 races this season – the EXCELR8 team leader’s maximum score reduced Hill’s advantage to a single point going into the day’s finale, in the tensest title duel in recent memory. And then just as he seemed poised to finish the job, the weather threw a curve ball into the mix, as rain transformed the track conditions.
 
From seventh on the partially-reversed grid, Ingram initially went on the offensive, snatching sixth from Hill through Paddock Hill Bend for the first time and climbing to fourth on lap two – putting him in a championship-clinching position. He proceeded to zero in on the top three, only for his car’s pace to suddenly and unexpectedly fade, and despite battling valiantly for every position, he was powerless to prevent a slide down the order to sixth as Hill overhauled him to seal the spoils.
 
While understandably disappointed at coming so close but ultimately so far, the 31-year-old was justifiably proud of his performance in 2024, surpassing his previous best season tally by 13 points as he chalked up six victories, nine further podiums and four pole positions to cement a fourth top two championship finish in seven years. By any standards, it was a truly outstanding campaign.
 
Tom Ingram, Driver, Team Bristol Street Motors, said:
 
“First of all, enormous credit and huge congratulations to Jake [Hill], MB Motorsport and West Surrey Racing – they’ve had a fabulous season and Jake thoroughly deserves the title. On our side, we’ve done the best job I think we’ve ever done. In the end, we came up just short, which is clearly tough to take, but sometimes it comes down to a bit of luck and fine margins.
 
“Naturally, we’re disappointed with the end result, but we can’t be disappointed in the slightest with the performance we’ve shown over the course of the season; every single weekend, we’ve rocked up with a car that has felt utterly phenomenal and such a pleasure to drive. We were staggeringly fast in the dry in the first two races at Brands Hatch, and had we not been wiped out at Druids at the start of the day, potentially we could have had two wins and a very different story.
 
“Everybody at Team Bristol Street Motors has worked so hard, and the car felt really alive and on-the-edge. I was so pumped after winning race two and the Hyundai felt great again on the way to the grid for race three, which gave me a lot of confidence, but for some reason, after the first few laps, we just had no front-end performance. Maybe we picked up some damage on the opening lap, I don’t know.
 
“We’d done everything we needed to do and were where we needed to be, and then all of a sudden, it was like somebody flicked the ‘off’ switch and that was that. I was three seconds off the pace over the last five laps and an absolute sitting duck, which was massively frustrating so we’ve clearly got some head-scratching to do as to why it went wrong and where we need to improve.
 
“I was always going to take it down to the wire and under no circumstances was I going to roll over, but ultimately, we simply couldn’t extract any more out of it. It’s really disappointing to lose right at the end, but to lose like that when you can’t even fight is doubly disappointing.
 
“Still, I can’t be anything but incredibly proud of what we’ve achieved here at Team Bristol Street Motors – we’ve had an amazing season. Sometimes, it doesn’t go your way, but we’ll just have to make sure we return even stronger in 2025 so we can take the title back…”

Images: Jakob Ebrey Photography