‘I set the lap record and won the championship’: how Tom Ingram took the BTCC title in style

Marcus Simmons meets: Tom Ingram

Tom Ingram frequently employs the words ‘enjoy’ and ‘enjoyment’. As well he might. After all, in early October 2025 he became the king of the British Touring Car Championship for the second time. This crown, following three years after his first conquering of the UK’s most-popular car-racing series, was far more, ahem, ‘enjoyable’.

“Winning the first title you get so caught up in the emotions of trying to do it that you don’t actually enjoy it,” reasons the 32-year-old, who has been part of the BTCC since his 2014 debut, aged 20. “Winning it this year, we just had a bloody good time. And you know what? This time around felt more like I remember the early Speedworks days [Ingram’s BTCC team from 2014-20], where you’re just having a laugh all the time. You’ve obviously got a very serious job to do, and we all want the best out of it, but you’re also really enjoying yourselves while you’re doing it. Winning it has taught me that you need to have good people around you to enjoy it.”

“You’ve got a serious job to do but you’re also enjoying yourselves”

The psychology of what Ingram is saying is obvious: get everyone on side and success is more likely to come. It certainly produced a monster of a car in the form of the Hyundai i30 N provided to him by Excelr8 Motorsport, his team since 2021.

Last season, crucial to the performance of that machine was Excelr8’s reaction to the BTCC’s surprise abandonment of hybrid. Before that had even been announced, Ingram and team-mate Tom Chilton were out testing at Anglesey with the weight out just after the chequered flag fell on the 2024 season.
“We obviously got the inside scoop of what was going on from the teams meeting that had happened about a week prior [TOCA always has a post-season get-together with its teams to hammer out rule changes for the forthcoming campaign],” recalls Ingram. “And fundamentally that was the most important thing we could go and do. Realistically, when the season finished, Vertu [title sponsor for Ingram’s and Chilton’s Hyundais] came to us and went, ‘How do we access this opportunity?’ We went, ‘By doing this.’ ‘Perfect. Well, let’s go and do it.’

“We got three or four days of bright blue sky with not a single cloud in it, about 12˚C air, 18˚C track, and it was exactly the same for four days. The only way you’d get better consistent testing simulation is to do it on a sim. And the amount of stuff and laps that we did was off the scale, which made such a difference. That was enormous for us.”

Veteran Chilton was important too, especially since – and it’s surprising to hear Ingram say this – “the two of us like a car set-up the same way”. ‘Surprising’, because Ingram has a unique ability to carry astonishing speed into slow corners, drifting across the track on braking to hit the apex with pinpoint precision, the car rotating beautifully while he gets on the power, while Chilton is a good old-fashioned ragger who seems to have grown up watching and learning Gilles Villeneuve videos.

“Tom’s been huge in all this,” asserts Ingram. “He’s not maybe had the results to back it up; some of the time he’s just been unlucky. But he’s been massive with developing everything as well in getting the best out of people and the car.

“Tom’s philosophy of getting it [the car set-up] is in an entirely opposite direction to the way I get it, but ultimately we want it to do the same thing. And that’s really useful – there’s no point us both doing the same thing. At the end of the final day at Anglesey, we swapped set-ups and went out, and we both did exactly the same laptime as we did before to within a millionth, and both of us went, ‘That feels really good… but this is worse, because we don’t know what to do now!’ At that point it was pick through the bones of what we’d just done and find out what was actually good and what felt good, and come up with a middle ground to it.”

Another key was Ingram doing much of his winter testing on the hard-compound Goodyear tyre. The BTCC rules for 2025 mandated use of this rubber as the ‘option’ tyre at several of the triple-header events, and such was its performance delta to the soft and medium that drivers frequently gravitated to the back of the field when taking their medicine…

“We knew that [the hard tyre] was a weak point for us,” explains Ingram. “We knew that fundamentally the car was amazing on the soft tyre so it was, ‘OK, let’s work on what we’re not so good at, bump those numbers up on where we’re not quite where we need to be.’”

This led to perhaps the standout performance of 2025 for Ingram, at Oulton Park. The sporting rules dictated that the top three in race one had to run the hard tyre in race two. Main title rival Ash Sutton cheekily slipped back to fourth on the final lap to avoid this. Ingram won and then, equipped with the ‘rubber of doom’, he somehow fended off Jake Hill’s BMW for fourth place in the next race.

“It is a circuit I absolutely adore,” he bubbles, “and also we’ve got a real handle on how to get the best out of the car around there. Off the back of that, your mindset is totally different. ‘We’re going to win.’ Not from a cocky, arrogant aspect, you just feel that strong in what you’ve got: ‘Yeah, we’re going to have this. So much so that we can still do this on the hard tyre.’ ‘No you can’t, you idiot, don’t be stupid.’ ‘Yeah we can.’”

The combination of Ingram and engineer Spencer Aldridge, together almost throughout the champ’s BTCC career, is well-renowned. To this, and Ingram’s mantra that it’s about the people working together, we can add data engineer Matt Campbell, plus, as well as Chilton, two further quick – and, crucially, amiable – team-mates in the forms of Adam Morgan and Senna Proctor (who, ironically, Ingram replaced at Excelr8 for 2021). Seasoned team manager Marvin Humphries and his wife Sandra keep everything in line, and Ingram pays tribute to his sponsor since 2012, Hansford Sensors and its boss Chris Hansford: “He’s been the kingpin to this. As much as he’s obviously an incredible personal backer of mine and the team, and a friend, Chris is a great mentor as well – you can rely on everything he says. You can float an idea past him and, even if he won’t react immediately, he’ll give you an answer two hours later and you’d know, ‘Right, that’s the way to do that.’ He’s been beyond perfect.”

That all leads to what appears to be a serene Ingram camp, but there’s been more help behind the scenes. In a series with such artificialities as boost penalties, reversed grids as well as that massive tyre offset, it’s vital to keep your perspective: “I did a lot of work with a sports psychologist a few years ago, who I still do some stuff with now, who was great for that sensible approach. You’ve got to win or be second and third, but be sensible with it. You’re keen for risk, but understand what that means at the same time.

“My 2025 season is probably the cleanest you’re going to have”

“Also managing what you can manage – I’ve said it no end of times, controlling the controllables. I’ve got no control over how fast Ash, Jake or whoever is going to be, but I’ve got 99% control over what I can do. If Ash goes out and is four-tenths faster than anyone else, good for you. What do I do about making my stuff better? I’m not going to worry about whether he’s quicker or slower. You just have this real methodical approach to it. The touring car season is really tough, because you have so many ups and downs, and my 2025 season is probably the cleanest you’re ever going to have, with one bad race at Snetterton [a crash]. Everything else was fairly meticulous.”

It’s a long way from five years ago. Back then, Ingram was renowned as the BTCC’s ‘nearly man’. After seven years together, Ingram and Speedworks Motorsport chief Christian Dick seemed inseparable. They had been ever-present in the BTCC top six over four consecutive seasons with Toyota machinery, first the Avensis, then the Corolla. And then came a split, leading to Ingram’s arrival at Excelr8, helmed by Justina and Antony Williams.

This was down to Speedworks’ rebrand from Team Toyota GB to Toyota Gazoo Racing UK, meaning Ingram could no longer give his sponsors substantial space in the car livery: “It didn’t work for us because we still had a multi-year agreement with Ginsters at the time. The difficulty was Ginsters was mine, and Gazoo was Christian’s. Neither deserved to not have the opportunity to make some money out of it. By making it happen, everybody would have been hacked off and nobody would have won.

“Actually the best thing was to go, ‘Look, none of us want to, but in the interests of us all to do as well at this as we can, we’re going to have to call it.’ And it was late – it was December, which is mental really. I’d thought I was going to be with the team for my whole career.

“I was working for Excelr8 doing some driver coaching for the Minis,” continues Ingram. “I’d kind of got to know a few of the faces, and you could see that it was a pretty cool outfit. They were the only ones in the support series spending good money on appearance, on the cars, and doing a good job on the circuit, and there’s a big value in that. So I thought it’s probably not a bad shout to have a little discussion with Justina and see where we can go, and it all happened super-quick.”
Crucially, Ingram took Aldridge with him, sparking a modern phenomenon where driver-engineer combos tend to go together from team to team in the BTCC. “That was absolutely massive,” he enthuses. “As I’ve said a number of times – while we blow smoke up each other’s arses! – I don’t think either of us would still be in the paddock without the other.

“Certainly from my side I could find an enthusiasm from within, but it needs to be shared with people around you as well. And that’s been a really special thing. Spenny and I have worked together since 2014, my very first test in a touring car, so we kind of know everything about each other in that sense. It was a natural thing to do to convince him that coming with me was the right idea.”

“When you look at the shape, the i30 isn’t far off being spot-on”

The raw material of the Hyundai was good too; its fastback shape is superior aerodynamically to the saloons and hatchbacks surrounding – or usually behind – it on the grid. “One of the big things that we saw, and it’s funny that it’s taken people until the end of this year to work it out, is the massive value of its shape,” points out Ingram. “When I went from Avensis to Corolla, the very first test I thought the boost pipe had fallen off the car, it was that slow. When you start to look at the shapes and sizes of overhangs and wheelbases, distribution and aerodynamic shape, I’d say the i30 isn’t far off being spot-on.”

In his first year with the Hyundai, Ingram placed fourth in the 2021 rankings. For 2022, hybrid was arriving in the series, adding significant weight to the cars. Speedworks had been BTCC organiser TOCA’s official development team for the Cosworth-produced system in the preceding years, so Aldridge used his knowledge of its installation to get a head-start. The Hyundai was on track at Snetterton just after the finish of the 2021 season.

“Once we saw that success ballast was coming out and we’ve got this big lump of lithium in the passenger seat, this was the best opportunity that we’re going to have,” explains Ingram. “We were out about a week after the final race of the season, starting to put that into action in terms of what we needed to do, to get the best position of the battery and all the other things we needed.

“We could 3D print the exterior of a battery give or take, fill it with the necessary weight at the necessary height, and simulate it as much as we could before the actual product arrived in the car. In the grand scheme of it, for the cost involved, it was a no-brainer. That was a huge leg up for us.”

Ingram defeated Ash Sutton and Jake Hill in a three-way title decider in the final race of the 2022 season, only for Sutton’s Motorbase (now Alliance Racing) Ford Focus team to instigate a massive development programme on the fourth-generation ST for 2023. Excelr8 got the worst of the weather wherever it went testing, meaning it was still validating its own development some way into the season, but Ingram still claimed the runner-up spot behind Sutton. In 2024 he was second again, this time behind Jake Hill and the West Surrey Racing BMW squad, his challenge scuppered in the very last race at Brands by the Hyundai’s curious abuse of its tyres in semi-wet conditions.

Pinpointing this malaise was the prime purpose of the Anglesey test when it was initially scheduled. After all, it was bound to rain in North Wales in October. Then came the bombshell that hybrid was being dropped, a refocus, and… perfect weather.

For all his talk of a ‘meticulous’ season, Ingram won more races – seven – than anyone else in the 2025 BTCC. And that took the overall victory tally for Hyundai chassis WPMS-NGTC-079, the same car he has used since 2021 and will continue to drive in 2026, to 24. It is now the most successful machine of the BTCC’s NGTC ruleset, which has been in place since the early 2010s. But it was the 24th that was the most special: the penultimate race of 2025, in which he put the title beyond the reach of Sutton.

“I set the lap record on the last lap to win the championship”

“We were looking at it as ‘let’s win it in style’, because you’ve got the confidence,” purrs Ingram of his pace on the soft tyre on the Brands GP circuit. “The race panned out perfectly. I saved my allocation of boost to near the end and set the lap record on the last lap to win the championship. That cements that feeling of just enjoy it with the people around you, knowing that you’ve got such a fantastic product to be able to do it in. It’s rare that you’re ever going to get that opportunity, so why not just enjoy it?” For Ingram, enjoyment is what it’s all about.