From Rebuild to Rise: Thomas Ingram Hill’s Rookie Season to Remember

A top-six finish in the ultra-competitive GB4 Championship has firmly established Tom Ingram Hill on the motor racing map following his first season in single-seaters.

The 16-year-old English racer had never started a race in an open-wheel car before the 2025 season opener at Donington Park in April, but by the finish of the campaign he had climbed to sixth position in a series that features grid sizes in the mid-twenties. It was a strong end to Ingram Hill’s first year under the wing of Dan Wells Driver Management.

“It’s a bit of a funny story – I knew his mother from social media of all places!” laughs Wells. “During the COVID days of 2020 and 2021 we’d always chat about F1 stuff. She had a son who was karting, and I was at a track looking after Kai Daryanani in 2023, saw that Tom was racing only about an hour away, and I thought I’d go and see one of his races. I said to his dad, ‘Make sure you don’t spend a lot of money and go nowhere.’ We’d see each other every now and again, and at the end of his 2024 Ginetta Junior season I got a phone call from his dad. He said, ‘Can you help me? It was a bit of a challenging year.’ It was November time when I started looking after him. A few of the GB4 teams were trying to sign him, and I brought him to Fortec Motorsport and he went from there.”

“Dan was brutally honest, he was very nice to us, and told us what path we needed to take,” says Ingram Hill. “Even when I went into Ginetta, Dan was very helpful and always there for us. When that fell apart Dan was instantly there to pick us up.”

Wells’s relationship with Fortec dates back to his time as a young up-and-coming single-seater racer, and he also placed Daryanani at the Daventry team for his British Formula 4 campaign in 2024. Adding to the symmetry, DWDM coach Duncan Tappy, who works alongside Mike Epps, won the 2007 Formula Renault UK title with Fortec.

“For someone of Tom’s character and disposition, it was important to put him into a place where he was loved, wanted and appreciated, and in a position to learn,” explains Wells. “After two rounds he was sitting P16 in the championship and there were some very panicked phone calls, but my message to Tom and everyone at the beginning of the year was you’ve got a lot of traumatic, negative experiences from the previous season of racing, and we need to be in a period of rebuild. If there’s a grid of say 27 cars, if we’re 18th that’s probably where we need to set our expectations just so we can move from there. After two rounds we were pretty much there. Then he finished P6 in the championship after a string of good results post-Snetterton.”

The Snetterton round, in July, was the turning point, with Ingram Hill narrowly missing out on a podium. Then he headed straight to Wells’s Drivers Lab in Dubai for a concerted week of simulator work and preparation. “At the beginning of the year he was managing school, exams and racing,” says Wells. “He was sometimes missing the Friday practice session. From Snetterton, he came straight with me on the flight to Dubai for a week, and it was a good opportunity to have a period of maturing and working with the guys at Drivers Lab to hone in on improving the driver, not looking at excuses. I did the first day with him, calibrating to the car that he was driving at the moment, and then Oscar Lee [Drivers Lab co-founder] took care of the rest.”

“The first half of the year was a bit challenging, but after I went out to Drivers Lab I came back and made massive progress,” says Ingram Hill. “I was able to rethink and work with Dan even more in that summer slot. So that made a massive difference. I think that first half of the year we were a bit unlucky too. We didn’t get points in three of the races and failed to finish two of them, but after having that summer break and really working with Dan it was quite easy to see the difference.”

It certainly was. “He went back to the UK and he was quick in every single practice session at Silverstone,” enthuses Wells. “He got track limits on his quali lap after his team-mate towed him to the front row, but he was the fastest driver of the Silverstone weekend and was unfortunate in one of the races – he went from second to fourth on the last corner in the wet. A string of strong performances, which helped him rise to P6 in the championship. It was nice to see that step forward.” Including Snetterton, Ingram Hill finished outside the top eight just once in the final 12 races, peaking with second places at Silverstone and on the final weekend back at Donington.

“Snetterton was a changing point I think, where we saw progress,” says Ingram Hill. “But even before that I was working with Drivers Lab on the sim. Then I went out and came back for Silverstone and that went really well. They were able to change what I thought, change what I was doing subconsciously. I’ve always been an automatic driver, but going out to Drivers Lab and working on it and trying those changes in a closed environment made such a difference for me.”

As well as GB4, Ingram Hill contested four race weekends in British F4 with Fortec. The cars are made by the same constructor, Italian company Tatuus, and produce almost identical lap times, but they are very different to drive. “I was having to learn a lot on my toes, and I’m still learning more about the F4,” he says. “Fortec knew that I was doing well in GB4, so they were supportive all the time, and for me that was such an incredible environment to be in. They were so helpful.”

“It was a near-half-season worth of experience in F4, which was useful for him,” adds Wells. “We also found that whatever he learned in the F4 car he could bring back to GB4. He certainly enjoyed the GB4 car a bit more in terms of its driving style, but each time he got back into the GB4 car he was going better and better. It was nice to end the year strong and prepare for 2026 in the best way possible.”

And what of 2026? The plan is a campaign in the F4 Middle East series through January and February where, says Wells, “he can have an intensive period of learning, and also being around Drivers Lab and our guys to make sure he makes the step required over the winter, and then with a main season of GB4 to try and finish in the top echelons of the championship.”

“It was big progress this year, I was really happy,” smiles Ingram Hill. “Hopefully that carries on and we keep the momentum going from where we finished this year and be inside that top three in the championship at the end of the year.”

“Tom’s a great kid, and the family are lovely,” reckons Wells. “He’s a very brave boy. He doesn’t have any issue with his courage going into the high-speed corners. It’s been mainly working on the more technical points – slow-speed and coming onto the long straights, thinking about exit speeds as opposed to entry. He’s coming over to Drivers Lab for a whole week to address the main performance areas and mentality to make the next step. He’s good to work with but still young – time is on his side.”