IN ASSOCIATION WITH
Ash Sutton crawled towards the Croft pitlane entry before his Ford Focus ST shuddered to a halt, the deranged left-front suspension at least making it across the white line, the rest of the British Touring Car Championship’s dominant machine marooned on the track. A day of potentially making a big stride towards his fourth title had ended in disaster, just as it did last time out, on the eve of the summer break, at Oulton Park.
Sutton abandoned ship, stalked towards the Motorbase Performance pit garage, and chirpy Tom Ingram sailed on to second place. The reigning champion and his Excelr8 Motorsport Hyundai i30 N were, relative to those NAPA-liveried Fords, nowhere on pace last weekend. Yet here was Ingram, completing another of the weekends he so loves to describe as ‘pointsy’ – he arrived in North Yorkshire six points down on Sutton; he left trailing by the exact same deficit. He and the Excelr8 crew can hardly believe their luck that they’re still right in it.
Neither Sutton nor Ingram was the big achiever across the weekend in North Yorkshire. That was the Yorkshire-born-and-bred but now Berkshire-domiciled Dan Cammish, Sutton’s running mate in the Motorbase bid for domination. Cammish claimed pole, won the opener, finished second to Sutton in the sequel, and rounded out the weekend with a solid reversed-grid fourth. That was despite being part of the shenanigans that led to the championship leader’s elimination via contact with Stephen Jelley.
Sutton seemed to have done it all perfectly. On a weekend when, like at Snetterton, each of the three Goodyear tyre
