PLATO SPRINGS FORWARD AS COOK TOILS
While Colin Turkington was feted for his 500th BTCC start at Snetterton, in the same race Jason Plato notched up his own landmark: 650 on the track where he scored his breakthrough win in 1997 with the Williams Renault Laguna team.
And, blimey, the old dog’s still got the fire in him. It’s been well documented recently that BTC Racing is struggling for straightline speed since the switch for
2022 to the new M-sport-supplied TOCA engine, but Plato managed to qualify his Honda Civic Type R in sixth position, kept in the frame through the first two races, and chased Ash Sutton home for second place in the final outing of the day.
Knowing that the Honda’s strength lies in cornering ability, Plato, according to
BTC boss Danny Buxton, was “purposely holding back [from the BMWS in front] to get pace through the corners” in the first two races. That worked a treat in the opener, in which he finished sixth, and he held that position in race two before a mistake let Ricky Collard’s Toyota past.
But that promoted Plato to third on the grid for the curtain-closer, and he followed Sutton past Dan Rowbottom on the first lap to grab second place. He pursued Sutton early on, bidding for that elusive 98th BTCC win, before then switching his attentions to his mirrors, in which lurked Collard and Tom Ingram. “We’ve worked really hard this weekend,” beamed the 54-year-old. “I started to chip into Ash and just reel him in over the first four laps, but I was using everything in my tyres and I thought,
‘Well, there’s a bit of a gap behind, let’s just see what happens’. And then I had to stop deploying hybrid because I didn’t have all the laps, and as soon as I did that: whooph, he’s gone. When they started to reel me in I turned the volume down a bit just to look after the tyres – if I needed to, I could turn the wick up a little bit.”
BTC has burned the midnight oil working on engine installation as well as further refining its chassis, and that could have kept Josh Cook in title contention, but another disastrous weekend has almost certainly dropped him out of the frame.
The West Countryman was 0.001s up on Plato’s sector one time in qualifying when, bizarrely, there was a simultaneous and unrelated failure of hybrid and throttle body, putting him a dismal 22nd on the grid. Cook made up eight places on the opening lap on Sunday, but almost immediately suffered engine issues in each of the first two races. “He was basically in limp-home mode,” grimaced Buxton. “They were dropping him a second, two seconds a lap. Josh is driving with an arm and a leg tied behind his back.”
Cook, who had a new engine installed during the previous round at Knockhill, had scored only one point for 15th in race two before the final 12-lapper, when he at least raced to 11th, in Rowbottom’s wheeltracks at the flag.