Ingram looking to maintain advantage over Turkington

Speedworks Motorsport's Tom Ingram has set sights on increasing his British Touring Car Championship points lead ahead of Colin Turkington as the current top-two title contenders start race one nose-to-tail at Rockingham.

The Toyota Avensis driver currently has a six-point lead over two-time Turkington in the drivers' standings, but will start directly behind the Team BMW driver in 13th for the opening race after enduring a 'difficult' qualifying session.

Ingram suffered two tyre delamination's during yesterday's 30-minute qualifying, but was still content to be 'in the mix' around his main title rivals.

Apart from Turkington starting in 12th, Ingram crucially out-qualified his immediate rivals with Josh Cook, Jack Goff and Matt Neal starting 21st, 23rd and 29th respectively.

"It was a difficult qualifying session. We had a delamination during the first run, which they are sending back to the factory to analyse," Ingram told Crash.net.

"The first one was out of our control. The second was probably more us pushing the boundaries and limitations of the tyre, more than anything else.

"It’s frustrating but we’re in the mix and where we need to be. 13th is OK. The people we need to be racing, we’re fairly close to as well. All things considered it could’ve been a hell of a lot worse."

As ever, Ingram is expecting his Toyota to 'come alive' as his level of success ballast drops as the day goes on. 

"We’ve got a bit of work to do still. We should be OK with a race distance," Ingram continued.

"We’ll be looking to make progress. Hopefully we can launch an attack on him [Turkington] early doors and see if we can keep a bit of an advantage and stay ahead of him. That would be the ideal.

"We know the car really comes alive when we take the weight out. We can look forward as the day goes through. We’ve just got to stay out of trouble and score as many points as we can."