Team VERTU’s Tom Ingram expressed frustration after a difficult qualifying session left him facing an uphill battle in the British Touring Car Championship at Donington Park, despite believing his Hyundai had a better balance than in his title-winning year.

The reigning champion criticised the current qualifying format, which saw him line up in 17th on the grid for the qualifying race, and acknowledged that safety car periods played a key role in his recovery drive to eighth.

“We had a difficult day and I don’t really know why,” said Ingram to TouringCars.Net. “We had a really good race car today, and it’s done everything I wanted it to do; it’s felt incredibly good.

“It feels if not better than where we had it last year in terms of general balance. But I was a second off in qualifying.

“None of us in a Hyundai, whether that’s Restart Racing or us at Team VERTU, have been strong this weekend. Tom was also eight tenths off [Morgan] as well with a full allocation of boost and everything else like that.”

Ingram expressed frustration that his starting grid position for the qualifying race was not based on his lap time, which would have put him in 14th, but rather on his ranking in the session, resulting in him starting 17th due to his qualifying group lining up in order on the right-hand side of the grid.

“It’s not school sports day – we’re not all allowed to win all the time. I don’t believe the [current] qualifying format is the right way of doing it because it means that you are given a double penalty for no real reason.

“Just have qualifying where your lap time determines your starting position…”

The EXCELR8 Motorsport driver conceded that the two safety car interventions had helped him to progress in the race by bunching up the pack and allowing him to attack the cars in front before they were able to exploit their TOCA Turbo Boost [TTB] advantage over him.

“I was helped out by a couple of safety cars so I could battle against cars without boost on those opening safety car restart laps.

“Once the race settled, I was a bit of a sitting duck, to be honest. I just had to try and be tactful with when I deployed my three seconds to try and overturn any advantage that they had, but it was tough.

“Race day will be a bit of an uphill battle. We’ll have a few laps tomorrow of a full [TTB] deployment that will help.

“But we’ve got to try and do our own thing. At this point of the championship, the amount of points that I’m back from Ash [Sutton], it’s not my championship to win, it’s his to lose.

“I think that was probably fairly evident from round three when we had all the issues that we had and seemingly continue to have this year.”