INGRAM AND TOYOTA’S JOURNEY IN THE BTCC
Matt James talks to the man at the controls of the new tin-top Corolla contender, a four-time winner in 2019
This was a watershed year for British Touring Car Championship star Tom Ingram. From finishing runner-up in 2018 and claiming the Independents Trophy, the then-25-year-old reached the promised land.
Not necessarily in terms of landing the overall crown, though, but Ingram and his Speedworks team had done enough to convince Toyota GB to put its full weight behind the programme for 2019.
The older-spec Toyota Avensis was parked and the Cheshire-based team set to work on its first new-car build in its history. It was a mammoth undertaking, and it was also a voyage for Ingram himself.
He had to lead the line in terms of development and he was doing it singlehandedly. He was one of only three entries in the 30-car line-up that didn’t have a team-mate to bounce ideas off – and there was the weight of expectation.
Ingram and Speedworks can now reflect on a season that brought four victories – including a dominant brace at Silverstone – and he was in the hunt for the crown right up until the final meeting of the season at Brands Hatch.
The campaign had begun with a shakedown at Oulton Park before the hatchback was loaded into the transporter and headed for Circuit Calafat in Spain. There was further mileage in the UK, but Ingram was still unsure about how the new combination would gel when the series kicked off at Brands on the Indy track on April 6-7.
Ingram says that he felt under-prepared but didn’t think he would ever be satisfied with the pre-season programme.
He says: “I don’t think it matters if you have done one day or 100 days of testing, you always want more. There was a shift in our expectations going into this season too. Instead of expecting to go out and win the first race of the year again [as Ingram had done in both 2016 and ’17], much as you would love to, our aim was to get through that first meeting and try to understand the car as much as possible. It was a mentality shift. We needed information on the car.”
Ingram lined up in eighth spot for the opening round of the season, and he was just under 0.4 seconds away from Ash Sutton’s pole-winning BMR Racing Subaru Levorg.
Even so, he knew that there was a different battle to play out through the 30 races in 2019. It required a shift in tactics from the man behind the wheel.
“Changing my mindset was a little difficult to do,” explains Ingram. “With the Avensis, when it had no weight in it, it was always a question of ‘right, when are we going to get to the front and how much are we going to win by’. That might sound blasé, but that is the way it was with that car. Then, when we went to Brands Hatch with a new car and without any weight, naturally, as a driver, you are targeting pole and you don’t get it, that is where you realise that the perception has to change.
“After qualifying at Brands, it was a nice place to be – close towards the sharp end. You also have to take into account that the Indy circuit is a bit of a unique circuit in the sense that it is short and it is tricky to get a lap time in. But then naturally, as a driver, I was disappointed not to get pole but that was the difficulty of managing our expectations – and there were positives because the car didn’t feel fantastic. It didn’t feel on point – there were still areas that we needed to improve. So those first few weekends, as frustrating as they may have seemed, were exciting. It was good because we knew that we hadn’t quite unlocked everything from it yet.”
He landed points in all three races, but the pressure was on when 3000 Toyota employees from the nearby plant rocked up to the second event at Donington
Park to cheer on the Corolla. Under the spotlight, Ingram performed, even though he admits that the reversed-grid race three win was probably a false dawn.
“That did flatter to deceive a little bit – 100%,” explains the racer. “There was a confidence boost there and we knew that we had taken a jump forwards. But it was actually the worst thing that could have happened at that point, because to get a win at the second race weekend of the year lifted the expectations and people were talking about a championship challenge. We had to rein people in a bit after that. We had to pull everyone back because we knew the task ahead.”
While that win helped the team leave Donington with a spring in its step, there was a crashing reality when the series reformed at Thruxton a few weeks later. Ingram did score points in all three races in Hampshire, but he wasn’t in the ballpark in the same way he had been at Donington.
“If you look over the last however many years, the Honda has always been the dominant car [at Thruxton] so there was a part of me feeling that we could be good around there,” explains Ingram. “The Civic is strong and we are similar in wheelbase, although we aren’t quite as good a shape. I was quite hopeful of a strong weekend, but the reality wasn’t the same as I thought it might be, and it was an eye opener and, coming straight off the back of a win, showed us that there was still a considerable amount of learning to be done.
“It did knock the wind out of our sails a little bit, but we knew that it was a unique circuit and the car maybe wasn’t ready for that yet. But, what it did do was point us in a direction of where we needed to go and where we needed to improve. For every negative, a positive comes out of it. It gave us a development focus.”
That development focus showed some results at Croft, but the mid-part of the year, including Oulton, left the team scratching its head a little bit.
“We used the lessons from Thruxton and Croft was an improvement, but we almost went too far,” says the 2013 Ginetta Supercup champion. “So we changed direction again going in to Oulton Park, but that is where we really felt the downside of being a one-car team. We went in a direction at Croft, and despite it feeling better, the driveability wasn’t so good. If we had another car there, we would have put that set-up on the sister car too and we would have quickly realised that maybe it wasn’t the right way to go and we would have found that information out more quickly. We could have boxed that off and changed our set-up.”
The epiphany came in the second half of the season. The two-day tyre test at Snetterton in the middle of July unearthed some secrets that pushed the car right into the mix at the sharp end. There was a win from pole at the Norfolk venue, which opened the floodgates and there were two further victories over the second part of the year.
Ingram had claimed before the start of the season that the opening 15 races would be about learning, and he would be on the hunt for wins in the second part of the challenge. He was bang on the money, and the tyre test was the turning point.
“We probably changed 10 very small
things in terms of the balance of the car and how we were setting it up,” he explains. “We looked at how we used certain parts of the set-up changed. It wasn’t just one magic bullet, it was a combination of lots of little things changing together and we worked through it and got to the right place for the car. That was then our baseline for the rest of the season.”
The car excelled at circuits where the surface was smooth, but other tracks where it was necessary to crash over the kerbs were an uphill task for the Corolla. Knockhill was a prime example of a tough life, and he was hanging on to the coat tails of the top six.
In the end, sixth in the standings was a positive reward for the season of work, but Ingram is more excited about the prospects of what is to come given the understanding that he and the team now have about the front-wheel-drive weapon.
“Thruxton is a great example of the work we have to do,” says Ingram. “If you go and look through [the official timing service of the BTCC] TSL, we pretty much matched purple sector one and we pretty much matched purple sector two when we were there. We were losing all of our time in sector three, where the big bumps are through the middle of Church and at the chicane too. As much as that was frustrating, it was also an indication of where we needed to work, but it also gave us the feeling that we were pretty much in the right place with the car. That is something we now work on to improve and to sort because that is naturally the next step forward for us.
“We have not got a bad car, we have got a very good car, we just need to find a tenth and a half or two tenths. Once we have got that, we will be in a super strong position. Or I could just drive it a bit faster, I suppose.”
Jokes aside, there is a clear strategy for 2020, which will include eradicating the weak points and building on the strong base which the Corolla already has.
“We have opened up the areas we need to improve on and what we need to sort,” says Ingram.
“We were still mathematically in with a shout going in to the final round at Brands Hatch. It put us in a strong place for 2020 and if we start the season well, then I think that is going to be the year we look to win it.
“I want the title: we have got to aim for that. This is my seventh season, and we need to put a bid together now. I have had enough chances at it now, so it is my turn to go out and claim it.”