Jason Plato delighted with pace, unhappy with reliability

Triple Eight’s Jason Plato leaves Brands Hatch fifth in the standings after a strong showing at the Brands Hatch Indy circuit this weekend. The 2001 and 2010 champion ran away from the pack along with Eurotech’s Andrew Jordan in race one, and charged through from 11th to third in race three after an issue in race two.

Plato and Jordan broke away from the West Surrey Racing BMWs and works Honda Civics in the first race to cross the finish line almost ten seconds clear in the only race which didn’t feature a safety car.

In race two, the MG6 failed to get away from the line with an unidentified electrical problem, but he was able to drive through to 14th, which became 11th after penalties were applied to the three Team BMR cars which had passed Mat Jackson under the safety car.

In race three, he and arch rival Matt Neal worked their way forward to second and third, just running out of time to close down on West Surrey Racing’s Colin Turkington in the 27 lap race, while both were running on the soft tyre, which many drivers were reporting was rapidly losing pace between half or two-thirds of the way through race.

“The thing I’m taking away with me is we’ve got performance on the soft tyre which we didn’t have last year,” said Plato to TouringCarTimes.

“That’s the area which we’ve worked on over the winter. Originally in the programme, we couldn’t make the thing work in the wet. We’ve got that sorted as we proved last year here and in Croft race three, and then our job over the winter was to try and improve the performance on the soft tyre, and we’ve done that.

“I’m going away a bit annoyed that for whatever reason the gremlins hit us again and cost us 17 points (in race two) and perhaps a win in race three based on our performance, but taking that aside I’m pleased as everyone here now knows we have performance on the soft tyre.”

Now with the performance of the car not in question, Plato believes Triple Eight just need to work on resolving the issues that plagued him and his team-mates at Brands Hatch.

“We’ve got to find out why it keeps going wrong. It’s a bolt-in item, whether that’s from Cosworth, Swindon, or ours, I don’t know, but it’s a widget that’s gone tits up, and we have to sort it. Marc (Hynes) has had a lot of problems this weekend, Sam (Tordoff)’s had a few problems, we’ve just got to get rid of them, and then we’ll (walk) it.”