Jason Plato praises team after double victory

Jason Plato has praised his team after becoming the first man to secure wins in both race one and two in the 2015 BTCC season.

The Team BMR driver narrowly beat Honda Racing Team’s Gordon Shedden to the line in the second encounter at Oulton Park, and was quick to sing the praises of the team around him in playing their part in the performance of the Volkswagen CC.

“This is a people business,” Plato said, speaking to TouringCarTimes. “You get the right engineers, you get the right management, the right level of investment in the team and you plug the right drivers in the team and if it all works out, particularly from a technical perspective, this is the result.”

Plato switched to Team BMR between 2014 and 2015, marking the first time the two-time champion was in a non-works team since the RML run Chevrolet in 2009, and only the second time he has driven for a non-works team in his near 20 year career.

“I was confident at the beginning of the year in Warren and his ambition and also his sound commercial platform, but the most important thing for me was the people we could bring,” continued Plato. “Carlos my engineer, getting Colin in, the best in the business is in that team. The car wasn’t that good last year but look at it now. I can only drive the car I put my bum in, the team have done a really super job, my car’s really ace at the minute, does everything I want it to do.”

The result now gives Plato the chance to win all three races in a weekend for only the third time in BTCC history, having done so himself in the past, while Dan Eaves also holds that particularly accolade. However, the Team BMR driver will line up in sixth after the reverse grid draw with soft tyres and full ballast, so knows his chances at a hat-trick are limited.

“Everybody’s got to take a bit of pain with the soft tyre,” he told TouringCarTimes. “We gambled a bit this weekend by using up [our final race three soft tyre], we can’t run the soft tyre in any of the race threes left now. The gamble is do we make hay while the sun’s shining and we have done so far. We want to use the hard tyre in race one and two so we could win a couple of races, and earn points, and now we’ve learnt a little bit of intelligence off Aron and Colin on how their cars performed on the soft so we can use a bit of knowledge there.

“We’ve got one setup we think will work. We tested it at Thruxton on the soft tyre, but we tested it with a view to learning and we’ve got that but it’s a bit of a gamble to run it. I’m the only one who’s got that setup. I think we’re going to look at Colin’s data from race two and make the decision do we evolve the car as it is now in the fashion as they have for the soft car, or do we make a gamble like they did? We’ll sit down and work that out in a minute.”