Jason Plato: “We should be half a second quicker”

Team BMR Subaru driver Jason Plato has questioned the fairness of the BTCC’s equivalency formula after the last weekend of the championship at Knockhill, reflecting that his narrow pole position margin would have been greater if it not been for

Plato took pole position by just 0.021 seconds over the Speedworks Toyota Avensis of Tom Ingram, while the West Surrey Racing BMW of Sam Tordoff was just three-hundredths of a second behind whilst laden with championship success ballast.

The two-time champion was critical of the engine equivalency formula which is managed by the championship organisers to balance out the performance different between the five different engine types on the grid, with Subaru and BMW both understood to have had reductions in their permitted maximum turbo boost levels last weekend.

“There just isn’t any equivalency,” said Plato to TouringCarTimes. “We have a rear-wheel drive car at a rear-wheel drive friendly circuit. We’ve got two not bad drivers in me and Colin, two not bad engineers, we have a £2.5 million programme here and no weight; and a BMW with 66kg of weight is setting the same time as us,” he said.

“I don’t think that’s what the rules are. The rules are not to equalise on lap time, it’s to equalise on engine performance, and the rules are clear but for some reason it’s not happening.”

Plato went on to win Race 1 by just over half a second ahead of West Surrey Racing’s Jack Goff, but while carrying 75kg of ballast in Race 2, he found himself under attack throughout the race by Tordoff and Subaru team-mate Colin Turkington.

“I know if we had the right level of performance, we’d be half a second to six-tenths quicker than we are now, and that’s where we should be with no weight on. We should be on pole by half a second, so it’s frustrating.

“Hopefully come the end of the year, this engine equality system or whatever it is will be looked at and it will be done correctly, as I don’t think it is at the moment.”