Nobody has ever pulled off the perfect weekend during the use of the current points scoring format in the BTCC. The magic 67 perfect points total hasn’t been hit on a race weekend by a driver. It’s designed to be an almost impossible task to crack it. The points system is also designed to carry the championship down to the last weekend of the year, and preferably deliver a showdown akin to the face-off that Jake Hill and Tom Ingram were tangled up in during the very last race of 2024 – but it doesn’t always work out like that.

If Ash Sutton were to take pole position, win all three races and receive the extra points for leading each race (which race winners get anyway) and fastest lap, and collect that 67-point perfect weekend, it’s likely he still wouldn’t win the 2025 title. In that unlikely top score scenario Tom Ingram would need an average finishing position of fourth in each of the remaining three races to guarantee the title.

It is unlikely that the 455 point threshold will be needed for Ingram to grab a second crown. This is the BTCC we’re on about here, there’s bound to be a couple of banana skins bouncing around the circuit yet, but for most of us this is lining up to be a weekend like 2023, where Ash Sutton took the crown in race one, and the last race of the year became a bit of a non-event, but if there is one person who is not going to give up until the maths say otherwise, its Sutton himself.

“I’m going to live and breathe it. I’m going to go off, I’ve got a few exciting things in the pipeline between now and Brands, so I’ll go off, do them, and then come back with a fighting chance and see if we can make anything of it,” Sutton said as the sun began to set at Silverstone.

What he returns to this weekend is a Ford Focus that isn’t at the level of the Hyundai that Ingram races. It hasn’t always been the case that the Korean machine has been faster, but this year the development race has led to the i30 N being the car to have, but why is it that we’re at this juncture right now?

“I think what’s happened is, if you look at lap times, we’re all going so much faster in lap time,” Sutton explained. “So yes, we were strong in ‘23. I think in ‘24 we saw the BMW and the Hyundai make a step forward. Maybe we didn’t make a big enough step, and that momentum remained. We were okay at the start of the year. Whether they were struggling at the start and they found a bit, I don’t know. But I think we’ve come to the bottleneck of this car and what we can do. I’m talking like it’s over and the end as the world is coming. We’re still second in the championship. We’ve still got a chance. We just need some lady luck.”

The form book can change a little. At Silverstone Ingram gained a point over Sutton, but that circuit, and its place in the calendar just before Brands Hatch is a happy anomaly for the neutral. It throws up topsy turvey things more than any other track, and inevitable a track that needs speed hits harder when the leaders are constrained in TTB. Ingram did take a win, and build a chunk more points in another, but canny tyre strategy in race three from Sutton brought the hit down. The natural gap per mile however should not be as wide in Kent as it was in Northamptonshire, but it’s last chance saloon. Reversing the 33 point deficit is a tough task.

Speaking about Silverstone Sutton said: “If you’ve got full deployment and you’re at the back, you can definitely make it work and pull yourself through. We proved that in 2023,” which is when Sutton won race two from the back of the grid. “We’ve done it a couple of times here where we came from the back to the front, but I mean, coming here when you’re in the championship hunt against a car that’s that fast in a straight line, it’s hard. But the fact is that they seem to have that stronger straight-line performance – whether that’s engine, whether that’s shape of car or what, they’ve got an advantage over us. So it makes this much more of a difficult place to come to.

“I mean, any track with a long straight, it hinders us”, Sutton added. “Snetterton being one of them. Thruxton not so much because that place is all about momentum, but there’s a couple of tracks out there. Donington is another where they have that advantage, but It’s part of British Touring Cars. It’s part of the sport. We sit and talk about the rear-wheel drive/front-wheel drive advantage. It’s no different to the conversation of hatchback versus saloon, and that’s just the way it is.”

The aero of the Focus is a disadvantage, and the common consensus up and down pitlane is that the BTCC is now an engine formula, with the Swindon/Hyundai unit being the top dog in that department. This year though Excelr8 and Ingram have had another trick up their sleeve, one that neutralises an advantage that Sutton has carried for the last couple of seasons – fast teammates.

While Sutton has been backed by Dan Rowbottom and Dan Cammish in the latter stages of the competition over the past three seasons Ingram has only had occasional support. This year that has changed. Tom Chilton has been on the ball most of the season. Adam Morgan has the pace to be ‘useful,’ and Senna Proctor has shown some fealty after taking the fourth car and showing that the squad car have all their cars working as a team. A bit of within the rules ‘interference’ could seal the deal early in the meeting, and conversely a bit of ‘solid positioning’ could go against Ingram from NAPA. Now with Sam Osbourne becoming a race winner, he could become a thorn too.

A number of fans queried why NAPA didn’t sacrifice Osbourne’s win at Silverstone by giving Josh Cook the win, and swapping Sam down to third and Ash to second so they could have decreased the title gap to 30 points, but that was never going to happen.

“I wouldn’t have wanted that,” said Sutton – quickly shooting down any suggestion that he could have swapped places with Osbourne – showing that motor racing does still have a modicum of humanity in its DNA. “I wanted one hundred percent for Sam to take that win. I wouldn’t have accepted that. If the team said it, I would have actually denied it because there’s such a small risk, such a small, I say small chance, it’s much harder for me to win the championship because of the points gap. So, I wanted him to 100% take that race win. If we got to second, I wasn’t up for the team game there.”

Ingram is almost nailed on to emulate his 2022 title winning campaign, but there are chinks of hope still for Sutton. A problem in qualifying could see him down the grid. A problem in race one could upend the day, but even then, Sutton has to get the job done, and there are only three out of 21 other cars on the grid who’ll move out the way for him.