High Wycombe’s Tom Ingram stormed back after a slow start at Thruxton on Saturday and his reward for a spectacular charge through the field was a solid points haul and a new lap record around the fastest circuit in the country.

The talented young Bucks ace impressed in qualifying as he hauled his ballast-laden Toyota Avensis around Thruxton’s flat-out sweepers to provisionally secure an outstanding third place amongst the 32 high-calibre contenders – some of the very best touring car protagonists on the planet.

An alternator issue left Ingram 32nd and last on the grid for race two but he went on to take the chequered flag 12th, less than two seconds shy of the top ten courtesy of a monumental effort that brought the capacity crowd to its feet.

In the finale, Ingram unleashed a scintillating turn-of-speed to fight past his rivals, circulating more than three tenths-of-a-second faster than anybody else and posting a blistering new lap record along the way as he zeroed in on the four-car fight over fourth, pinching seventh from three-time BTCC Champion and race one winner Matt Neal beginning the last lap.

His charge keeps the KX Akademy graduate and MSA Academy member firmly in the title hunt in third place, just 11 points shy of the summit of the Drivers’ standings and a close second in the Independents’ Trophy. Speedworks sit sixth in the outright Teams’ table and third amongst the Independent Team entries, with home turf beckoning next at Oulton Park on June 9/10.

Ingram said: “Not having to carry as much weight with us to Oulton is certainly a relief. I probably just got a little bit too greedy in qualifying at Thruxton; I’d say sixth place was representative of our true pace, and whilst it was clearly frustrating to be relegated to tenth on the grid, that was far from the end of the world.

“Unfortunately, we lost all the electrics very early in race one, including the power steering, which made it really hard work to hang on through the faster corners. We tried various fixes, but then the alternator gave up completely on lap five and I had to retire. I had some fun in race two coming through from the back. I couldn’t even see the lights from where I was starting – my engineer had to call them for me over the radio – but our goal was to get into the points and we did that without picking up any damage, which was a great result.

“We were really quick again in race three, but all chance of pushing for a podium if not better disappeared at the start. It would obviously have been nice to finish higher than seventh, but to come away with 14 championship points after the dramas of race one was a pretty decent job in damage limitation, and to beat a lap record that had stood for 16 years prior to the weekend and that had been set by such a touring car legend as Yvan Muller is a pretty cool achievement.

“With overtaking so difficult at Oulton, your weekend there is very often conditioned by your qualifying performance, so more than ever, the key will be to secure a strong grid slot and then see what we can do.”