Outgoing champion concludes BTCC campaign with back-to-back triumphs
Team VERTU star cements fifth consecutive top two championship finish
Bucks-born ace already laser-focussed on 2027 and ‘taking his title back’
Tom Ingram added two more wins to his British Touring Car Championship tally in the 2026 finale at Brands Hatch last weekend (10-11 October), skilfully securing the runner-up spoils in the standings before his season ended in dramatic fashion.
Ingram has invariably excelled around the Kent circuit’s legendary, 2.43-mile ‘GP’ layout – home to Formula 1’s British Grand Prix on no fewer than 12 occasions between 1964 and 1986 – and right from the outset, he was once again one of the drivers to beat.
After lapping second-quickest amongst the 23 high-calibre protagonists in free practice, a scant 0.081s adrift of the fastest time, the 2022 and 2025 BTCC champion belied his comparative lack of TOCA Turbo Boost (TTB) in qualifying – by dint of his elevated championship position – to grab fifth spot on the grid for Saturday’s ‘Race to Pole’.
With just three seconds per lap of boost at his disposal – while three of the four drivers ahead of him had access to the full 20-second complement – further progress was always going to be tough, but Ingram relishes nothing more than a challenge, and having neatly despatched fellow multiple title-winner Ash Sutton and Josh Cook into Druids to climb to third, he sliced past team-mate Ricky Collard at Dingle Dell to complete a superb opening tour.
Thereafter, the Team VERTU star kept Aiden Moffat solidly in his sights for the duration of the ten-lap bout, taking the chequered flag barely half-a-second shy of the Scot to bag a front row starting slot for Sunday’s curtain-raising contest.
With the top two on the grid the only drivers to opt for the soft-compound Goodyear tyres, the pressure was on to make the most of them – and Ingram indubitably did. In front of the live ITV4 television cameras and a capacity trackside crowd, a lightning launch catapulted him immediately into the lead, and while he subsequently had to concede the advantage to Moffat – who had considerably more TTB at his fingertips – that was not the end of the story.
Having judiciously kept his powder dry, the talented Bucks-born ace zeroed back onto the tail of the Audi and tactically exploited some of the little boost available to him to draw alongside exiting Clearways on lap 11. Holding his nerve to sweep around the outside into Paddock Hill Bend and reclaim the initiative, he went on to clinch a stellar fourth success of the season – and he was far from done.
With the lowest TTB allocation in the field – and on the less competitive medium-compound rubber as per the regulations for the top three finishers from race one – the odds were firmly stacked against Ingram in race two, but he evidently hadn’t read the script. After again nailing the start, he produced a peerless performance to artfully control proceedings throughout en route to a 45th career triumph – his third in swift succession.
The 33-year-old was eager to sign off with another strong result from ninth on the partially-reversed grid in the weekend’s finale, but fate decided differently. As the cars accelerated away from the start-line in the fading autumnal glow, Ingram found himself caught up as collateral damage in a clash between two other drivers, with the contact firing his #80 Hyundai i30N backwards at unabated speed into the Paddock Hill Bend barriers.
The size of the impact left him battered and bruised and prompted a trip to hospital for precautionary checks, which thankfully revealed no lasting damage, while the theme of ‘wrong place, wrong time’ was somewhat symptomatic of a season that nonetheless extended the Coventry-based racer’s run of finishing either first or second overall in the UK’s premier motor racing series to a fifth consecutive campaign. More significantly still, his earlier pair of victories augur well indeed for a renewed assault on honours in 2027...
Tom Ingram, Driver, Team VERTU, said:
“Our plan was to use Brands Hatch as a little bit of a testing opportunity to try out some of our theories for next year, while simultaneously aiming to finish the season on a high. The car felt phenomenal all weekend, although we went into the ‘Race to Pole’ not really knowing where our pace was going to be, because the boost – or lack of it in our case – always makes a bigger difference in race trim than over a single lap, when you can counteract the deficit a bit more.
“That meant we had to be fairly strategic, and I tried to be aggressive at the start, because nobody has TTB on the opening lap so it’s a level playing-field. Our pace was really strong on the medium tyre, and towards the end, I was actually closing back in on Aiden [Moffat] for the lead, but I was also aware that Josh [Cook] was closing on me – and both of them had a chunk more boost than I did! I don’t think any of us was in the mood to do anything silly, and I was very happy to finish second.
“Race one on Sunday was a lot of fun. Aiden drove magnificently and didn’t put a wheel out-of-place or give me too many opportunities to get past. The difference in TTB also made things difficult, so I had to pick my battles wisely and I knew he had a lot of deployment so there wasn’t too much point in putting up a big fight early on.
“I felt we had the edge over him when he wasn’t deploying, so I tried to force him into using his boost as quickly as possible so that the race would come back to us later on, while remaining mindful of not wanting to scrap too much because then Josh would have caught us both. It was a major risk move for the lead going around the outside, but I like racing with Aiden, because I know it will always be hard but fair and respectful and it worked out perfectly. That was an excellent way to start the day.
“Josh was very fast again in race two and kept me honest, and although we had a bit of a gap, it certainly wasn’t plain sailing. It’s very easy to trip up on track limits, and if you begin to relax, you can rapidly lose concentration and pick up a silly penalty.
“Race three unfortunately didn’t last very long – I’d predicted a bit of carnage in the last one of the year, but I’d hoped it wasn’t going to involve me! I was literally a passenger and it was a big hit, so it was a shame to end the season like that.
“We haven’t had an easy run of things in 2026, but Brands Hatch proved the pace and performance we’ve had all year, which through failures or issues or just sheer bad luck, we haven’t always been able to show. Clearly, these results came a bit too late and we made Ash [Sutton] and NAPA Racing’s life far too easy for them, but to take three wins on the bounce at Silverstone and Brands was fantastic and demonstrates what might have been.
“Massive credit to Team VERTU for staying positive and sticking with the programme. When we knew the championship was gone, it would have been very easy to switch off but we haven’t done that in the slightest. We kept working and immediately turned our attentions to 2027, when we fully intend to hit the ground running – and take that title back!”
Image: Jakob Ebrey Photography
