Jason Plato was in a positive mood after his season-best qualifying in the British Touring Car Championship at Donington Park, having put his Vauxhall Astra in third on the grid for race one.
Plato was just behind Power Maxed Racing team-mate Daniel Lloyd in the Q2 shootout at the Leicestershire circuit, having earlier in the day also been fastest of all in second practice.
The 53-year-old put the up-tick in form down to having found an issue in the set-up data in his car, which he believes has rectified a power delivery issue.
“We’ve had a good run on Saturday morning and not really had any issues,” said Plato. “We’ve just chipped away and slowly but surely improved the balance; we found something yesterday on the data.
“I had a Zoom call with my engineer, and we just trawled through the data for a couple of hours. We didn’t really understand; my car, not necessarily Dan’s but certainly mine, just doesn’t accelerate very well.
“We found an issue, something to do with the high-level mapping. Any tiny modulation, even 5% off the throttle, we were losing 30% of the boost.
“So, they’ve made some changes and it appears to have made quite a difference. I don’t know where we are down the straights, but it feels better than we were.
“So I’m pleased; I think our race pace will be OK. But every time we get behind another car we lose performance because of our charge temperature.
“We could see that with Dan when he was in clean air at Silverstone – and then when [Jake] Hill got past him his straight line performance dropped off quite a bit from where it was. We haven’t fixed that yet.
“It would be nice to get into the lead and spear off. Get nice fresh air in the front of the car, but I think that’s going to be difficult.
“It would be ace to win some races; it’s what I’m here for.”