Jason Plato is keen to shift focus to a return to winning ways in the British Touring Car Championship next season after another difficult campaign in the Team BMR-run Subaru Levorg GT.
The two-time Champion has just four points finishes to his name – including a solitary podium at Croft – from 27 starts this year, and heads into the Brands Hatch finale this weekend [29-30 September] just 27th overall.
The Buntingford-based team’s struggles have been well documented, with straight line speed and engine cooling two prominent Achilles heels.
Plato – the BTCC’s most successful driver in terms of race wins – sits just four race victories from a century, but has only amassed two from 87 starts in the Levorg, a strike rate of just 2%.
“I have plenty of unfinished business,” Plato told title sponsors Adrian Flux.
“I know if I’m in a competitive car for me then I will be back winning races again and that’s what I need to do.
“The last two years have been hell, really. There are many reasons for that, but if I think back to where we were in our first year with the car, once I had got my head around rear wheel drive I was a match for Colin [Turkington] at the end of the year. The wheels have come off ever since.
“We’ve had lots of problems – I’m on my seventh engine now, and we had over-heating problems again at Silverstone, plus I’ve had some pretty abnormal luck,” he added.
“It’s been unbelievable from my perspective and I’m looking forward to rebooting and thinking about the future.
“I know when I have the car underneath me, I know how I felt in the car at Croft, I know I can do the business. You don’t forget how to drive racing cars.
“I’ve historically been very good in everything I’ve jumped in, including year one in the Subaru. I turned the MG, something that was not very good, into the finest NGTC on the grid, likewise the Seat and Chevrolet.
“The last two years I’ve not been able to make my car do what I want it to do. On the odd occasion I have, bang, the performance has been there, like at Croft.”
Looking ahead to the final triple-header of 2018 around the 2.43 mile Grand Prix loop, Plato expects another headache on the straights but hopes a strong weather forecast can help address some of the issues.
“We’ll try to be as competitive as we can at the weekend,” he said.
“I’ve historically been very good round Brands Hatch. It’s a drivers’ track, a chassis circuit, but I’m also very aware if you haven’t got a very good engine the very long straights are going to be tough.
“We’ve had difficulty with straight line performance from the beginning of the year – it is what it is and it hasn’t changed really. There’s still a massive disparity between us and every other car on the grid.
“But the weather should be good all weekend, nice and sunny, which will get some sun on the track and the temperature will be higher than normal at this time of the year, which will help us.”