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Tom Ingram beat Ash Sutton to victory in the first race of the British Touring Car Championship round at Oulton Park.
But the result looks in doubt following two second-lap incidents that will most likely be looked into by the officials.
Ingram got a decent getaway from pole position in his Excelr8 Motorsport Hyundai i30 N Fastback, but front-row partner Ash Sutton’s Alliance Racing-run NAPA Ford Focus ST was instantly on the offensive.
On lap two, reigning and four-time champion Sutton tried a lunge down the inside of the Island hairpin, but there wasn’t enough room to squeeze through and contact put 2022 title winner Ingram into a slide.
Sutton now had the momentum on the inside line to the chicane, but Ingram attempted to turn in from the outside.
There was more contact, and Ingram elected to steer out of the chicane and cut the corners – as he controversially did last time out at Thruxton.
The two stayed close for half the race, before Ingram eked out a margin of over a second, eventually crossing the finish line 1.913 seconds in front.
Photo by: Jakob Ebrey - JEP
Of the incident at the chicane, Ingram remarked: “I deployed hybrid coming down the hill, and that point I’ve got no option other than to make contact and jump through the chicane. It’s always very tricky.
“After that, I was at the mercy of the tyres, I was at the mercy of the brakes, I was at the mercy of everything. There was a lot to try and manage, but it’s good to take the first win of the day.”
Sutton said: “Tom left the door open at the hairpin and I opened that door – there was slight contact but if a door is open a car’s going to fill it.”
On what happened at the chicane, Sutton quipped: “I think he should take up rallycross with the amount of joker laps he’s doing these days.”
Dan Cammish, in the second of the Alliance Fords, survived a bump with Tom Chilton at the first corner and remained close to the leading duo for the first few laps, the Berkshire-domiciled Yorkshireman also gaining the bonus point for fastest lap.
Cammish then came under attack from Jake Hill in his Laser Tools-liveried West Surrey Racing BMW 330e M Sport.
Hill had leapt from seventh on the grid to fifth at the start, before passing the Excelr8 Hyundai of Tom Chilton at the chicane on lap three to grab fourth.
He had just moved into position to make a move on Cammish on the ninth lap when he locked up at the Island hairpin, the BMW running off track and dropping to sixth behind Dan Rowbottom’s Alliance Ford and the sister WSR BMW of Adam Morgan.
Rowbottom had two concerns in the closing laps – the looming attacking threat of Morgan, and a black-and-orange flag for a flapping right-rear wheelarch that went unheeded – before taking fourth.
Chilton fell away to a distant seventh, but it was the fight behind that could play a major part in the outcome of the forthcoming second race.
With the top 10 in race one all forced to use the hardest available Goodyear tyre from their allocation for race two, and an estimate 1.5-second delta between the hard and the soft at this circuit, most of the runners from the midfield down opted to take the pain of getting their hard rubber out of the way in race one.
Aron Taylor-Smith was the highest-placed of this group on the grid, and remained so in the race, but his Power Maxed Racing Vauxhall Astra had to fend off the Speedworks Motorsport Toyota Corolla of Josh Cook on the Dubliner’s way to eighth place. Cook’s team-mate Aiden Moffat completed the top 10.
Colin Turkington had trouble getting his WSR BMW away from the grid on the formation lap, and at the start proper he went nowhere. The four-time champion was wheeled into the pits before joining in one lap down.
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Source: Autosport