INGRAM’S OULTON JINX CONTINUES

“It shows what a bad weekend everyone else had that I’m still second in the championship,” said Mr Every Cloud Has A Silver Lining Tom Ingram after close of play at Oulton Park. “We should be fifth.”

Remarkably, Ingram has never finished on the podium at Oulton, thanks to a litany of misfortune during his seven seasons with Speedworks Motorsport – which now seems to have carried over to the Excelr8 Motorsport Hyundai i30 N he’s piloting this year. In qualifying, the turbo wastegate became detached from its downpipe on his out-lap and, located as they are between the engine and bulkhead, “where it’s about 1000 degrees”, this couldn’t be fixed in time.

Ingram raced through to 14th on the grid for the opening race’s restart, but with 66kg of ballast on board “we’d rooted our tyres in the first half of the race and at the restart there was just nothing left”, and he faded to 19th. Race two was much better. With no success weight, the Hyundai forced through to 10th: “I felt that was enough to say, ‘Surely the Oulton Park gods will give me the ball to be on pole’”, only for Ingram’s Speedworks successor Rory Butcher to draw the number 9…

Ingram had got up to sixth on the soft option tyres at the start of race three, but the red flag meant he had to do it all again. This time, he was running on the outside of Butcher on the exit of Old Hall when he was confronted by a spinning Ash Sutton: “Gulp. Mown grass. 104 water temperature. I’ve got to bring the car in really.” From there, at least he rejoined to set the fastest lap point.

And Ingram was happy for the Butcher/speedworks success: “I was worried it was a Speedworks-and-tom curse here; now I know it’s just a Tom curse. The first thing I did when I got out of the car was text Christian [Dick, Speedworks boss] to say well done.”