Sutton takes early BTCC lead after Donington Park opener

Let’s not get bogged down in the minutiae, the penalties, the exclusion, the statistical quirks of a weekend that turned upside down and inside out more often than a Diana Ross song from her Chic-inspired early-1980s period. The British Touring Car Championship’s opening weekend at Donington Park proved that there are two drivers currently operating on another level from the opposition. And, as if anyone had any doubts, those two are Ash Sutton and Tom Ingram.

Sutton came away with two race wins and the championship lead on the first competitive outing for the Alliance Racing-run NAPA team’s new ‘Titanium’ saloon version of the Ford Focus. Ingram crossed the finish line first in the other two races in Excelr8 Motorsport’s further-refined Hyundai i30 N Fastback, but neither of them counted. All the reigning champion had to show on Sunday, after a weekend where he was just marginally the fastest, was a solitary second place.

But, as they say, there’s a long way to go: nine more weekends comprising 36 races, including each event’s new-for-2026, half-points Saturday qualifying race. And there’s a whole host of sporting regulation tinkering that we’re yet to fully see the effect of. We likely will next time out in May, at the Brands Hatch Indy Circuit.

One of the big changes this year lies in the TOCA Turbo Boost regulations. In 2025, the championship leader went into a race weekend with an allowance of just one second per lap of TTB in qualifying, deployed at a minimum speed of 135km/h. This increased (and the minimum speed decreased) over a sliding scale across the top seven, until eighth and below had 15s/115km/h to play with.

For 2026, the championship leader’s minimum speed for deployment has been raised to 140km/h, with those outside the top seven given a whole 20s deployed at 105km/h. At Brands, this will play out on the calendar’s shortest laptime, where pole is earned in 46 seconds… And where does Ingram lie in the points? Yep, eighth: reserve that pole position, qualifying race win and race one victory for him now.

Ash Sutton came out on top after the BTCC opening weekend

Photo by: Jakob Ebrey

“I don’t know if that’s a good thing going to Brands,” shuddered Sutton in the aftermath of his win in the Donington finale. “One second of TTB, that’s going to be painful that’s for sure, especially when there’s a qualifying race.”

“Maybe it’s a sort of saving grace that actually we will have a little bit more TTB going into Brands, which might be a blessing in disguise given how tricky it’s going to be,” understated Ingram, doing his Tom Ingram thing of turning a negative into a positive.

"There was a metal screw hanging out and it’s ripped a hole in the sidewall. Me and screws, we don’t get on" Ashley Sutton 

Ingram appeared to have the measure of things on Saturday at Donington. Free practice has been cut from 70 minutes across two sessions to a sole 40-minute period, which he topped comfortably. Qualifying is now just one stage, albeit split across two groups. Ingram was fastest in his; in the other, Sutton got down to just 0.008 seconds away from the time of his nemesis, then shredded his right-front tyre when he biffed a chicane tyre stack.

“There was a metal screw hanging out – there’s loads of them not fully seated and it’s ripped a hole in the sidewall of the tyre,” he explained. “I had exactly the same thing at Croft last year. Me and screws, we don’t get on.”

Neither, it appeared, did he and Ingram in the qualifying race. What a shame that this played out on Saturday rather than in front of a full raceday crowd. The first lap was proper high-cholesterol tin-top stuff, Sutton chiselling his way past, Ingram surging back ahead. Then Dan Rowbottom – in the debut race for Plato Racing and its pair of Mercedes A35 Saloons – impishly swept around the outside of Sutton into the chicane, and drew alongside Ingram on the pit straight. Sutton tucked in behind, with team-mate Dan Cammish to his left, picked up the slipstream and ducked to the inside of Ingram on the approach to Redgate.

Ingram very quickly moved across to cover, Sutton was forced onto the grass, then speared across the track and swiped the innocent Cammish as he looped into the gravel trap. Sutton was out; Cammish plugged on, but the rear suspension damage killed his tyres and eventually he was duffed up in a reprisal of the Scottish Wars of Independence by Gordon Shedden, Aiden Moffat and Dexter Patterson, and finished 13th. With the other Alliance Ford pair, Sam Osborne and BTCC debutant Lewis Selby, also suffering damage, Cammish’s result was the best for the team. More than one paddock wag chuckled about the qualifying race being amiable Alliance boss Pete Osborne’s idea in the first place…

Ash Sutton ended in the gravel on Saturday

Photo by: JEP

“I had a good run on the pair of them – Tom and Dan [Rowbottom],” recounted Sutton. “Tom seemed to be so focused on Dan that he left a gap to the right. I filled it and he went to cover it, and unfortunately I was in the gap. He just moved too late unfortunately, which put me on the grass, and the moment it got on the grass I was a passenger. And the last car you want to take with you is your team-mate’s – gutted for Cammish, he was on the receiving end as the complete innocent party.”

“I think Ash just tried to find a gap that didn’t really exist,” retorted Ingram. “He tried to just stick his nose into somewhere that wasn’t there and ended up finding himself on the grass. From that side, he’s got himself to blame. He’ll always blame me, of course he will. But if you try and make a gap that doesn’t exist, you’re probably going to end up on the grass.”

The curveball here was that Ingram had been out of position at the start, and would be awarded a five-second penalty, confirmation of which came on the fourth lap. It transpired that a problem getting into neutral had caused the Hyundai to lurch forward on the grid. Furthermore, there was a suggestion that his ‘sighting tape’ on the pitwall had been slightly misplaced in the confusion caused by the host of team-jacketed hangers-on on the grid.

As you’d expect, Ingram was clever here, faced as he was with Rowbottom and the Speedworks Motorsport-run Toyota Corolla GR Sport of Josh Cook on his tail, and using the yellow flags for the recovery of the stricken Focus: “I was trying my best whilst there was a yellow flag out, to sort of try to push Dan back into Josh wherever I could to try and get those guys battling a little bit. Which obviously worked. I could then try to get some clean air and get a gap, break the tow and try to get my head down really.”

While the pace of the Mercedes fell off sharply over the late stages, Ingram kept the hammer down and fell just 0.024s short of eradicating the 5s gap. If that finish line had been a few yards further down the road…

Ingram then appeared to have triumphed in the opener on Sunday, only for a ‘significant’ overboosting infringement, which we will attempt to explain in a column about the Donington weekend, to result in that win being taken away. Sutton, meanwhile, fought brilliantly through to fourth on the road from the back of the grid to finish on the tail of Rowbottom. He didn’t need to try to pass the Mercedes, because on the final lap came notification that the Midlander had copped a 10s penalty for repeated track-limits offences. Sutton was therefore second in the final results.

Tom Ingram was handed a penalty for overboosting

Photo by: Jakob Ebrey

With no TTB restrictions yet in force, this was a particularly meritorious rise for Sutton. “That was very hard to come through, because everyone’s got 20 seconds [per lap of TTB],” he related. “I was on the medium tyre, not the soft, so to get to where we did was awesome.”

Four drivers were on the soft Goodyears in this race, and Mikey Doble ran at the back of them early on with Power Maxed Racing’s brand-new Audi A3 Saloon. Then Cook crashed as the result of a slow puncture caused by debris, and Doble passed the West Surrey Racing BMW 330i M Sport of Charles Rainford and then Rowbottom to finish second on the road. With Ingram’s exclusion, that became his second BTCC race win.

From then on, Doble’s day would take a turn for the worse. In race two “I just struggled with the [lack of] TTB. And we’d changed the set-up for the soft tyre and it didn’t really work on the medium,” he explained.

“I don’t know if it’s going to go down to a two-horse race. The Audi looked phenomenal, the Bee-Ems have been strong as well. It’s early doors before you can claim anything like that" Ashley Sutton

But it was a great weekend on the whole for Power Maxed: Moffat and Patterson each had a trio of strong results, and the team ended the day with all three drivers in the championship top seven. From last August’s disastrous fire to this.

So, two races, two wins for the BTCC’s new cars. And then Sutton made it three out of three (and, later, four from four). This was the straightforward run you’d expect, especially given there was no prospect of an Ingram surge from the back: the Hyundai had trickled into the pitlane at the end of the formation lap after “the alternator stopped alternating, which was sub-optimal”.

Rainford ran second for over half the race on what was a good weekend on the whole for the WSR BMW team, notwithstanding team-mate Daryl De Leon’s sometimes shabby fortune, especially when you bear in mind the squad’s struggles at this event in 2025.

Rainford "cannot wait" to get to Brands Hatch in May

Photo by: Jakob Ebrey

“If we seem to be fairly quick around here, I cannot wait to get to Brands Hatch!” fizzed the ever-effervescent Rainford. The problem for him is that he finished the day runner-up in the standings, so he’ll carry a chunky TTB handicap into qualifying, but watch for De Leon.

Rainford eventually faded to sixth behind a bunch of soft-tyred contenders, with Cammish rising to complete a 1-2 for the Alliance Fords, just ahead of Shedden, for whom this was the weekend’s high-water mark.

The Scottish three-time champion and his Speedworks-run Laser Tools Toyota inadvertently helped clear the way for Ingram’s storm up the order in the finale. A push on De Leon, for which Shedden was later penalised, compromised their races and also those of Cook and Tom Chilton, among others. Ingram sailed through, a sizeable chunk of the midfield now out of his way to help his rise to the runner-up position behind Sutton.

Sutton, team-mate Cammish as well as Ingram were among those on soft tyres in this race. Making things tricky for them – well, the Fords anyway – was Ingram’s new Excelr8 Hyundai team-mate Ricky Collard, who had started from reversed-grid pole. The 2024 British GT champion had started the weekend looking like someone who’d done hardly any touring car mileage in two and a half years, which was exactly what he was. But by the end of it the old multi-generational Collard feistiness was back on display, prompting some Sutton chuckles.

He couldn’t quite keep Cammish behind, but the Yorkshireman’s track-limits penalty promoted him onto the podium anyway behind the two men who are resoundingly the BTCC’s top dogs.

“I don’t know if it’s going to go down to a two-horse race,” reflected Sutton. “The Audi looked phenomenal, the Bee-Ems have been strong as well. It’s early doors before you can claim anything like that. Never in doubt was that he [Ingram] was always going to come through, especially on the soft tyre, and some people had a limited amount of TTB – it was just how long it was going to take. As long as it was long enough that it didn’t affect my race!”

Sutton knows he has a battle on his hands, and it will start with one arm tied by TTB behind his back at Brands.

Brands will host the second race weekend of the season on 9-10 May

Photo by: JEP