Plato on his chances of a second BTCC title

In 2001, his fifth year in the championship, Jason Plato took his first British Touring Car Championship away from the clutches of team mate Yvan Muller, as Yvan’s Vauxhall broke down coming out of Paddock Hill bend at Brands Hatch in the final race.

Jason reflects on that championship season, the other chances missed to take his second championship since and his chances to put that right this year with the world touring car Cruze, in an exclusive to TouringCarTimes on Saturday at Silverstone.

“That year in 2001, it was pretty horrible if I’m honest…whilst I’m really pleased I’ve experienced that, because…I’ve learned some lessons from things I did wrong, and I’m sure likewise Yvan has. It was a bloody hard championship to win that, bearing in mind the in-fighting, the politicking in the team – and if you come through that and come out of that well, and intact mentally and control your emotions throughout the year and focus on what you’ve got to do, that’s a really big learning curve that.“

“I don’t look back fondly on it really, cos it wasn’t a harmonious time in the team, but I do look back on that as a big success, cos Yvan is a phenomenal competitor and I know my car was as good as his and his was as good as mine, so it was just about two blokes on the track.”

“Then I left for a couple of years, came back in ’04 with SEAT – and it wasn’t really until we got to ’07 I think did we really get ourselves in a position where we had a great car, and we should have won that year. We didn’t, we were very close, and we should have won in ’08, but we had a lot of mechanical issues with the car, but we were certainly quick enough.”

“So then teleport ourselves to last year, we should have really won last year actually if truth be known, but we were in a very different situation, playing catch up, didn’t have any miles, ‘took us until mid way through the year to unlock the performance of the car, to really understand it.”

“If you tot up all the issues from when things went wrong, we should have won it, but we didn’t…nevertheless we all slept well in our beds last year, we did a great job.”

Jason Plato and Yvan Muller battling in 2001

“I think the Cruze as a chassis is more precise in it’s design to work for the World regulations, i.e. the flat floor, i.e. the characteristics of the Yokohama. It’s certainly a more advanced car, it’s more tailored for that set of regulations, and of course we can’t run a flat floor here, we have a different front splitter arrangement and we also have different tyres.”

“The summer break’s given us a real good opportunity to actually really properly dig down into the data and really understand, we know what the characteristic of the car we had which we didn’t like, but then try to get rid of that characteristic without upsetting some of the good things about the car, and the team have managed to do that. Snetterton was our run out with our new philosophy on the car and it proved to be very successful.”

“So yeah, out of the last few years, I’m in the best position I’ve been a long while to actually win the series.”

Jason’s team-mates since rejoining the BTCC in 2004 have usually been developing drivers, learning the ropes in touring car racing, such as Rob Huff, James Pickford and sportscar veteran Darren Turner. Jason explains SEAT’s and Silverline Chevrolet’s similar approach to team orders in the BTCC.

“The environment I have here is more similar to what I had at SEAT, than I ever did at Vauxhall. Yvan was the No.1 driver at Vauxhall, whether I liked it or not – that’s just how it was.”

“There is the common misconception that I was No.1 at SEAT, I most certainly wasn’t – it was equal. If you look back to what happened a few times at SEAT, had I been No.1 I would have won the championship because the other guy would have pulled over and I would have got more points.”

“We just simply didn’t have that philosophy, we don’t have that philosophy here, there are no team orders here. Arguably that’s a better way really, a better way…, I’m sure, if it was the last race of the year, I’m sure Alex would help…but at this point of the year, he’s out for himself and quite rightly so.”

Jason Plato’s Chevrolet Cruze, a car which currently leads the British & World Touring Car Championships

Coming out of the mid season break, Team Aon have been at full attack, with their Ford Focus running on liquefied petroleum gas with a turbo clocking up the points, and now the team sit just 14 points behind Plato in the drivers standings with three meetings to go.

Plato has been the loudest voice of the teams and drivers in the paddock who feel that Team Aon’s turbo is providing them with an unfair advantage.

Plato shared with us his counter to Team Aon’s claims on why they’re disadvantaged running a restricted turbo on LPG, in the wake of Chevrolet’s dominant run at Snetterton.

“I’ll tell you why we’re the quickest…these guys (RML) have spent millions and millions and millions of pounds, and they’ve got fantastic engineering skills and without doubt are the power house in touring car teams globally, without a doubt.”

“We have the very best car, we have the very best engine, and we have the very best engineers – and there’s also another link in the chain, the driver – I’m not too shabby, of course we should be the quickest because we’ve unlocked the performance of the car, at the beginning of the year we weren’t, but now we’ve unlocked the car.”

“If you look back in the history books, you’ll find that when Tom Chilton’s ever run with a good team of team mates, who are of any quality – he looks pretty average. So why then, when one link of that chain is missing, lets have a look at the team, is that team anywhere near as good as us?”

“Can someone explain to me, why they feel they deserve to be quickest. It doesn’t make sense, their performance is wholly attributable to having a MASSIVE engine. “

“We’re not whinging. I’m quite happy to say to them, here – have my engine. Lets dyno my engine and make your engine no faster than mine, I’m happy with that. They’d be 1.5s off the pace, back where they should be.”

“And don’t for one minute believe and say to the world “oh, we’re only this much quicker in these speed traps”, his argument you can blow holes in, cos he’s only looked at one lap, I’ve got data for every single lap done, including tows and all the rest of it, and they’re still five miles an hour quicker than anybody else.”

“The most important thing is that everyone’s harping on about speed at the end of the straight, it’s not that, it’s speed at the start line. It’s acceleration, and in 380 metres at Snetterton, they were 6mph quicker than me. And if you saw what happened in race three, I can’t race that car, I can’t race it. Because it pulls so much in a straight line, it can go really slow around the corners, and like my ridiculous scenario I put – lets get some bloke out there in a 700bhp 2CV, would you be able to get past it? No. “

“It’s a different category of car, and it should be banned.”

“Look back at touring car racing from the mid-nineties. Everybody was within a mile an hour of each other, and that’s what touring cars’ about, well, for two cars to be able to just blast past people, hold on, that’s not what it’s about – people don’t come to see that. If people want to go and see that, they go to Santa Pod.”

Plato following the two Team Aon Fords in race one at Silverstone

One of the comparisons made is when Jason ran with the SEAT TDI unit, still raced in the World Touring Car Championship, which gave the SEAT Sport team the edge over Chevrolet & BMW in the WTCC and took Yvan Muller and Gabriele Tarquini to two consecutive titles.

In 2008, SEAT UK ran that engine for Jason Plato & Darren Turner, and has been used as an example against Plato to claim he’s happy when it’s he who has the performance benefit. Jason’s response to that was:

“There’s a huge difference. The engine they’ve got is a full S2000 engine, so it’s light. It’s a proper racing engine…AND it’s got a turbo.”

“A diesel engine is very heavy, it’s a cast iron block…it has a very low power delivery, maximum revs was 4,200 revs, and they way it develops its power is very unusable.”

“So we had that to cope with.”

“Okay we had a diesel, but it was okay with a diesel because those regulations were in place for years for any manufacturer to go and do what we did. It wasn’t like four days before the first race, we’re going to let them have a turbo – and that turbo was a tool to equalise, not to give them performance – but with all our shouting it doesn’t seem to make any difference”

“And I hear all this stuff about, “oh we’ve got problems engine braking”, what a red herring that is…in the braking areas, you don’t use the engine to slow the car down. The brakes decelerate the car, not the engine. All the engine braking does is…imagine you’re in 1st gear, and you accelerate to 40mph and lift off the throttle, you get a big pitch change, if you did it in fourth gear, you’d hardly feel anything. That’s what engine braking does for you, so in a fast corner, you modulate the throttle, you can alter the balance of the car, it can sometimes be helpful.”

“And restrictors…making the restrictors smaller, actually now you see what they’re doing is increasing their torque. They’re getting more torque now by running the smaller restrictor, until you get to about 34mm, the restrictor will do nothing. The problem isn’t the restrictor, the problem is boost. They’re effectively running a 3.6 litre engine.”

“I don’t mind if there’s LPG, just turn the boost down by 0.4.”

Jason’s quick to dismiss any talk about the 2011 season, wholly focused on what’s going on this year before looking at it.

“I don’t know what’s happening next year; it’s so far up the road.”

“Certainly, this whole saga that’s going at the minute, we’ve just seen it happen in Sweden with the Scirocco, we really need to understand what’s going on.”

“I have no beef with Arena. They’ve got what they’ve got. I think if they’re honest with themselves, they know it’s wrong, but when you’re that side of the fence and you’ve got the goodies, you play the game.”

We asked Jason would it make a big difference in how he handled defeat, if come to the end of the year he lost to Matt Neal’s Honda, or one of Team Aon’s drivers.

“Without a doubt. I’m racing with Matt, and we’re racing to the same set of regulations…I know if he’s quicker than me down the straight, it’s only a little bit, and I can probably make that up by getting my car better, and vice versa, we’re racing to the same set of regulations.”

“If a Ford wins the championship it’s a farce, and to be honest, it should have won the championship already, the performance they’ve got as we’ve seen is not just a little bit, it’s a joke.“

At the weekend, the Team Aon Fords went on to take victories in all three races, although the restrictor and their boost was turned down by 0.1mm and 0.1 bar respectively after qualifying.

Team Aon’s Tom Onslow-Cole is now in second place, only 14 points behind Jason Plato in the drivers standings, and Tom Chilton 44 points behind in fifth.