Jason Plato confident of BMR success in 2015

Jason Plato is eagerly awaiting his chance to compete with reigning champion, and new team-mate, Colin Turkington in equal machinery as he chases his first British Touring Car title since 2010.

Plato, who has moved to Team BMR alongside his main title rival from 2014, believes that having Turkington on the other side of the garage will put the team in the best position to challenge for overall honours come the end of the season.

“To amount a championship challenge you need four ingredients,” said the two-time champion, speaking to TouringCarTimes. “You need pace, reliability, you need a car that can qualify and be kind on its tyres and you need something that you can’t engineer – a sprinkling of luck. If you have all of those things then you’ll win the championship, if you don’t get all of those things then you’ll get some wins but you might not have the consistency over the year.

“What I do know is we’ll be reliable as we have a really good bunch of guys here, and I’m sure we’ll have performance of the cars as we know what we’re doing and we all have above average driving ability. We have very good engineers and let’s just see what happens with lady luck.”

With the two top drivers from 2014 joining the BMR squad, along with the engineers that helped them on their way to the sharp end of the standings, the team has gone through an extensive winter testing programme, with Plato feeling the car is coming on leaps and bounds as a result.

“The car’s had a big step change over the winter,” he continued. “We brought the knowledge over with how a front-wheel-drive car needs to be set up and where they were wasn’t right. That’s evident in the fact that Alain Menu [who drove one of Team BMR’s Volkswagen CCs in 2014] is a world class driver and he was a bit off the pace. It takes some knowledge from engineering people, other than the driver side, to work that out.

“These are quirky things these NGTC cars, they’re not traditional in the way you set them up, and often what feels right isn’t right in the lap time. There’s been a big step change in the set up of the cars and the theory of how you set them up and we’re seeing results from it.”

The BMR outfit now have arguably one of the strongest lineups in the BTCC paddock, with Plato and Turkington joining existing BMR driver Aron Smith, who took two wins in 2014. When asked if he was looking forward to taking Turkington on in equal machinery, Plato grinned and nodded enthusiastically.

“It’s going to be fun, I think the competition internally is going to be fierce, and I don’t think there’s a lot between us. Aron’ll be there as well, he’s got the benefit now of using our set ups and that’ll help him enormously. Without a doubt he’ll be a pain in the arse at some point.”