From South Korea to a team in Suffolk via a specialist in Wiltshire
Some might say it’s a masterstroke. While those using the brand-new M-sport-built TOCA customer engine have lagged a bit in testing, Excelr8 Motorsport commissioned bespoke Hyundai powerplants from former TOCA supplier Swindon Powertrain for its squadron of i30 N machines, and lead driver Tom Ingram has been up there in testing.
We can be sure that TOCA will, if it feels necessary, allow the customerengine users some extra boost in time for Donington. That was, indeed, a possibility as we went to press. But for Ingram, who has used the Swindon/toca engine throughout his BTCC career to date, it was a case of getting to grips with what he already knows, despite the
Hyundai block being completely new to NGTC competition.
“It feels good,” asserts Ingram. “There’s nothing crazy going on. I haven’t jumped in it and gone, ‘Oh my God, this feels insane, there’s so much power’, but equally I haven’t jumped in it and gone, ‘It feels a bit shit’. It feels exactly as it should do. Driveable, good top speed, good bottom end. If you’d said we had the same engine as we had last year, I’d say, ‘Yeah, OK, it feels strong’. From a driveability point of view, from a comfort point of view, knowing how it works, I’m really happy. I’d like to think we can be close to the pace with it, but we’ve also got to remember it’s a completely new engine philosophy for us with a new block. It’s going to be a bit of a season of fettling and learning and understanding it.”
Hmm, so could it be another nearly-man season for Ingram? One such was 2021, where he was often lumbered with 66kg of success ballast as second in the championship and, on a front-wheel-drive car, that hurt. Ingram describes the outgoing system as “a bit archaic”, and that the i30 N was “a good car with ballast. We were the heaviest of the front-wheeldrive cars coming in every weekend, so we should be outqualified – that was the very concept of it. The car feels actually better than we had last year. There’s a slightly different weight distribution in terms of where the battery is going and where the success ballast was, but I actually think we’ve got quite a good base to work from primarily because we’ve got the knowledge of what we had last year.”