“I went to the accountant, and everyone who was working at their desks stood up and applauded me as I walked through the door! Weird stuff like that. You don’t realise what a big deal it is, but it took two hours on the Monday to reply to all the messages. You’re just in your own little bubble, cracking on, and then you realise there’s a lot of people watching it.”
This isn’t 2022 British Touring Car champion Tom Ingram talking. Instead, it’s his engineer Spencer Aldridge. You see, the top end of the BTCC is all about such driver/technician double-acts, such as we continue to see with Ingram’s title-winning predecessor Ash Sutton with Antonio Carrozza. They’re like Brian Clough and Peter Taylor, Saint and Greavsie, Simon and Garfunkel, or even Morecambe and Wise. Could one do it without the other? Possibly. But maybe the magic wouldn’t be quite there.
To recap, the Ingram-and-Aldridge partnership grew up at Speedworks Motorsport, before commercial reasons owing to that squad’s increased branding from Toyota for 2021 forced a driver who had become known as the BTCC’s ‘nearly man’ to jump ship. He found a home at Excelr8 Motorsport, and here Aldridge joined him. “That was a really difficult decision to make,” reflects Aldridge of his departure. “I’d been working with Christian [Dick, Speedworks boss] and his dad at his dad’s garage since I was 16, just at nights and
