Mick Palmer

5.5 points. Over the final six races of the 2025 season Ash Sutton needs to outscore Tom Ingram by 5.5 points per race to overcome his 32-point deficit if he wants to claim a fifth BTCC crown.

Ingram could claim the title at Silverstone with a round to spare if he garners 36 points more than Sutton in the three races at the venue later this month.

Considering how close the pair have been all season it seems unlikely that Ingram would grab the glory before we head to Brands Hatch for the final round, and conversely, considering the advantage that the Excelr8 Hyundai i30 N of Ingram has over the Alliance Ford Focus of Sutton, it’s hard to envisage a scenario where he can close down that 32 point gap if both run trouble free to the end of the year.

“It’s a race and a half. We need him to have two bad races and one of them needs to be zero points score, and the other one needs to be near enough no points,” Sutton told Touring Car Magazine at the end of a tough day at Donington last Sunday. “On the back of that, we still need to go and win those two races, so it’s a big ask. I mean, I’m not one to give up but we know how quick things can change in Touring Cars. It only takes a couple of things. But yeah, they’ve got a nice margin now.”

Motorsport is all about numbers. Decrease them on the circuit and you’ll find your off-track totals rising. It’s a s simple as that. Isn’t it? Well, no, it’s not. We humans have traits that can defy the calculations. One messy moment from Ingram, or a from a fellow competitor that negatively affects him, and there could be that DNF and zero points in a race, with the following one being on the back foot losing more points. In that case things equalise if Sutton takes the wins he spoke about – and in that scenario he must. And again, conversely, another shove along the lines of that he received from teammate Dan Rowbottom at Donington could end up with a much worse result – which could give Ingram the title earlier than planned, because those numeric plotlines are not the be all, end all of the upcoming story.

That margin between the two machines, and whether it remains so, was being discussed in hushed tones on Sunday. The Hyundai i30N that Ingram races is considered as having the best engine in the series. It’s an engine that should thrive on the ‘point and squirt’ National layout in a couple of weeks’ time, and with a chassis that seems able to glide on smooth surfaces, it would appear to have the upper hand – but those quiet tones imply that there is a sub-plot to change how the i30N runs. Those hushed voices claim every year that X driver has a little more power for the final rounds, and that Y driver has his car pegged back.

• 36 Points – how many points Ingram needs to increase his advantage by to win the title at Silverstone
• 5.5 Points – how many points more than Ingram needed by Sutton to win the title this year
• 103 points – how many points Ingram needs to secure the title in any situation
• 22 points – the total needed by Ingram to eliminate Dan Cammish from championship contention
• A single 11^th place in six races from Ingram mathematically removes Rowbottom from the title battle
• A win a fifth and a pole from Sutton, with no points for Ingram, is scenario that equals the points gap

Away from the conspiratorial murmurings, there has already been some changes in how Excelr8 run their car. The flat-floor mounting on the Hyundai was investigated earlier this year, leading to a loophole in ambiguous wording regarding the reference plain being closed off. Other teams claimed that the slightly different way of attaching the floor to the car gave an aerodynamic advantage during rotation, but even after the re-wording of the regulations, the Hyundai that Excelr8 runs has been the car to beat, and there is more to come.

Tom Chilton, who won his second race of the year at Donington pointed out that fact by stating: “This is probably now one of the best Touring Cars I’ve ever driven in the British (Touring Car Championship.) Now it’s very good car. Still, there’s a little bit more work to do, but it’s 95% sorted.”

When asked about the comments of his teammate (who is becoming a useful thorn in the side of the NAPA Ford Focus squad,) Ingram told us: “There’s always more in everything to find. Nothing’s ever perfect, but it’s blooming close. There’s a bit more. We can get it. It’s a wonderful car. It’s a very, very nice car.” Sutton agrees with his foe, saying he’d “like a shot” in the machine to see how far ahead of his Ford it really is, but that’s still not the key in how the script for the next month can throw up a late surprise. Contact at Donington between the pair, and in the case of Sutton also with teammate Rowbottom show that human fallibility, and raw ambition, can force the tale to take a different path.

In the third Donington race Sutton, on the harder medium tyre, didn’t let Ingram, on the faster softs, walk past him in the early laps. Some tough racing – and diving and defending into the Melbourne Hairpin – led to some side-to-side contact between the pair, with Ingram running beyond the kerb into the dirt.

When asked about that move after the race Ingram told us: “Did I enjoy being put on the grass by Ash? No. Did I enjoy the battle? Yeah, it’s all good fun. I think it’s three-nil at the minute because he’s dropped me on the grass three times so far this year. Not that I’m counting – but I am counting!”

Despite the jovial response, Ingram is obviously wary of how Sutton has to race to claw back the difference between the pair, but he is not giving an inch. He must have calculated that in the near future a do-or-die move from the Alliance racer has as much of a chance of backfiring as it has to come off, but he’s not interested. The response he gave about how he’ll handle things was almost a stock quote. It was close to word-for-word identical to the response he gave this journalist at Silverstone last year when he and Jake Hill were the two realistic title contenders heading into Brands Hatch.

“We’ll do the same as we’ve done this weekend, just do our own thing. I don’t know the points. I don’t want to know the points. I don’t know who’s where. I don’t care. I just want to keep driving around in circles.”

Sutton knows how the game works. His calculations add up, but his focus takes a slightly different corridor. “I’m only going to do so much in terms of a fight,” he pointed out. “I’m not going to drive him completely off the track or crash into him or do anything like that.” It was a little different during that race three bashing. “It was a small bit of contact,” he continued, “which obviously just dropped a wheel (of his) on the grass, but it’s Touring Car racing. We’ve got to put a bit of a show on. I’ve got a tyre deficit. He had the advantage. It was just borrowed time, ultimately. So yeah, I had to put up a fight I try to do it in the best possible way I could.”

When Sutton took his fourth title in 2023 he pointed out to us at the time that he and Ingram had hardly raced each other all season wheel-to-wheel. Usually when one was at the front the other was further back, and they top and tailed all year as the then implemented Hybrid rules helped separate them. Ingram was always on the backfoot with the car though. The Focus took Sutton to 12 wins, and he delivered the most dominant performance across a BTCC season in nearly 30 years. The boot is on the other foot now with the very same cars having their performance roles reversed. Sutton has an opinion on that too.

“The performance that they’ve got in their car is something else. I would love to have a shot in that car because I think I’d be quite surprised myself with how much more performance they’ve got than us.”

But another thing has changed. Teammates. Sutton was swiped by one of his (Rowbottom) in Race Two last Sunday, and it took some time to cool off after a race that Ingram reckoned (before the race) they had ‘given’ to Sutton on softs tyres in fourth, behind his medium shod machine. Eighth was his final position in Race One, but the pole it returned (after the DSQ of Chris Smiley) didn’t settle things as his ‘guaranteed’ win was wiped out. “It’s one of those incidents. I’m not happy about it, of course. I’m sure Dan wasn’t either. It’s just one of those that it was a racing incident, a small error from his side in braking a bit too late and locking up,” he said. “Obviously, tempers are still quite high after the race, so we let it settle before we had a bit of a chitchat. But I’ve been there. I’ve made mistakes, and I know the feeling. Sometimes you’re passenger of your own errors. So that is where it wasn’t ideal. It’s not ideal from a championship perspective. It’s really hurt us there, but there’s only so much we can do.”

Ingram has three teammates who are on the pace this year. Sutton has had Dan Cammish as well as Rowbottom to back him up. Ingram was a lone ranger in previous seasons, but now has Chilton – in possibly the best form of his BTCC tenure – Senna Proctor being in a feisty mood and Adam Morgan boiling with frustration at being not quite at one with the car. All three have the pace to ‘get in the way’ of Sutton, or to move aside for Ingram. We’ve seen tactical position swapping, but having that backup is a bonus for Ingram if he needs it. It would appear that there is only one claimed weak spot, one that another rival pointed towards – wet weather.

It’s not that Sutton has a driving advantage per se, but there are those along pitlane who consider the Hyundai to be much weaker than the Ford in wet conditions. Some of that comes back to how it caused Ingram to lose out to Jake Hill in the final race last year when wet weather setup arguably allowed Hill to walk away in the final title battle. There are eyes that are already looking to the skies above Silverstone later this month and Brands early next month with a hope that the red-hot Indian Sumer of 2023 – where Sutton took the title in the opening race – won’t return.