Tom Ingram was frustrated after the British Touring Car Championship races at Knockhill, where the Speedworks driver lost significant ground in the title fight after an exclusion for a technical infringement in race two.

Ingram’s weekend started on a positive note when he put his Toyota in sixth on the grid for race one, qualifying as the third-best front-wheel drive car in the field.

The 25-year-old then took a solid points haul in race one with 66 kg of ballast on board to set himself up for a stronger race two in inclement conditions.

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There, Ingram made progress in his lighter Toyota, finishing second at the chequered flag before disaster struck in the post-race technical checks.

Ingram’s car was found to be marginally under the permissible ride-height at the front, with officials throwing him out of the results.

Not only did that lose him his podium result, but he also had to start race three from the back – with the 66 kg of ballast that he had earned for crossing the line in second.

Whilst title rival Ash Sutton was able to make rapid progress, Ingram could only manage 16th come the end of the race, just missing out on the points despite making up 15 positions over the course of the race.

Explaining his race two exclusion – the defining part of the weekend that leaves Ingram 43 points adrift in the title race – he accepted the decision of the officials, which he says was ‘black and white’.

“It’s frustrating, of course it is,” said Ingram to TouringCars.Net. What’s frustrating is that it’s so marginal. But the rules are black or white and it either is or it isn’t, and it isn’t.

“The limit is 80 mm or whatever and we were 79 mm or something. The leading edge was down for about 10 mm and after that it was fine.

“It actually makes no difference; we get no performance increase from it and we get no benefit from doing that.

“The boys are on it with stuff like that – they don’t drop the ball. We had a little bit of shunting on the first lap, getting pushed behind by somebody else and it doesn’t take a lot of damage to move a splitter.

“You’ve only got to move it down by a quarter of a degree and all of a sudden it’s illegal. It’s shit, but the rules are black and white.”

Ingram admits that in order to get back into contention for the championship – even though he is still second overall – he needs leader Colin Turkington to have some misfortune in the next two events.

“We’re 43 points off the top – it’s a massive, massive gap. Colin needs some disasters and he’s not had any this year, really.

“We can only do our best. We’ll keep a slightly positive outlook and we go to the next couple of circuits that don’t favour the rear-wheel drive cars as much as this does.

“We knew this was going to be a testing weekend, but we didn’t expect it to be quite as bad as this. But we’re in good shape for the next couple of weekends.”