Jason Plato has dismissed the triple header of Dunlop MSA British Touring Car Championship races at Donington Park tomorrow [17th April] as a ‘test day’ for both himself and Team BMR as they look to continue their development curve with their brand-new Subaru Levorg models.
Plato, who qualified at the back of the Subaru quartet in 18th with a fastest time of 1:15.931, elected not to switch from wet tyres to slicks unlike the majority of the field in qualifying following the red flag stoppage near the end of the session, prefering to focus on gathering consistent data for his engineering team to work from on the wet rubber.
Speaking to TouringCars.net after qualifying, he disregarded the result, which by his previous years records would have been a disappointment, and focused on the job in hand to bring the Subaru into competition with the current weapons of choice in the UK’s most popular tin-top series.
“D’you know what, I couldn’t give a sh*t!” chuckled Plato. “We’re here to do a job and we’re here to develop the car.”
“I’m not in the mindset of going out looking for the extra tenth, because when you get into that mindset you don’t listen to what’s going on with the car. And the sooner we can get a direction on what we need to do with the chassis, we’ll be in a position to challenge for the better places.”
He also pointed out the usefulness of his tactic in qualifying, as he and the engineers at Team BMR believe they have exposed some of the cars weaknesses in setup through their analysis of the data after the session. He also admitted his focus is no longer on fighting his way through to the front of the field in trademark fashion, but to keep the car running consistently to ensure it develops properly.
“We’re not quick enough to challenge for the sharp end of the grid, and I’m not trying to challenge for that – all I’m trying to do is develop the car. So actually it was quite a productive session because we’ve learnt something quite key in the debrief, because we’ve all got different setups, and the cars are very different.” he explained.
The car is currently suffering in terms of straightline, with favourable cornering speeds compared to that of it’s rivals, but with an inability to quite maintain parity with the other models on the straights. Despite this, Plato is confident the issues will soon be resolved and once they are, it is clear to see from the timesheets that Team BMR will be in an ominous position.
“That [straightline speed] is hurting us massively, but we’ll get that sorted at some point and that’s going to be a big step forward.” Plato enthused.
“I mean, we’re not a million miles away with the car, I don’t believe. I mean, we haven’t got the nicest balance with the car but if we look at what our issues are costing us, they’re costing us a lot. That’s work in progress.”
Looking ahead to the hat-trick of races at the East Midlands venue tomorrow, Plato admitted the team are treating the second meeting of the season as another opportunity to put more mileage on their quartet of machines, citing a lack of point in racing for a few points as added incentive to focus properly on the cars development, rather than following his gut instincts and going for overtakes.
“It’s a test day. We’re going to throw three different setups on it and get three lots of data. I’m not a racing driver at the minute, I’m a test and development driver. There’s no point racing for 10th, is there? It’s tricky, because the natural instinct is to get stuck in, but I simply cannot allow myself to do that because I’ve got a job to do.”