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Jason Plato has blamed Tom Chilton for his troubled time at Rockingham yesterday when he fell from third to sixth in the HiQ MSA British Touring Car Championship’s standings.
SEAT driver Plato believes a clash with Chilton in race two cost him any chance of scoring meaningful points as the incident had a knock-on effect for the day’s third race as well.
Plato’s SEAT Leon TDI and Chilton’s Honda Civic clashed in race two. The former champion needed to pit so his team could check over his car, although a great comeback drive – aided by a safety car period – saw him finish inside the points in ninth.
One more place would have seen him start near the front of race’s three’s grid (after the top eight places were reversed) and he could only end the day with a sixth – again after a sensational drive through the field following a 30 seconds stop-go penalty in the pit lane after his mechanics exceeded the time limit working on his car on the grid.
 Plato blasted: “The weekend for me was ruined by Tom Chilton in race two.You can’t change your line in a braking area, and coming down from 130mph into a hairpin corner he just turned left into me. It wrecked his race as well as mine.
“We had to pit to check the car over and from last position we finished ninth – and then we were a little unlucky as the top eight was selected to start race three in reverse order.”
He added: “Sometimes you have days where everything you do just doesn’t go quite according to plan, and this was one of those days. It’s been a bit of a lottery, and we haven’t had much luck – although in race two and three we’ve had some great drives back up through the field from last place.”
Plato had finished a lowly ninth in race one meaning Rockingham marked the first BTCC race meeting in more than a year in which he had failed to achieve a podium result in any of the three races. Furthermore, he has dropped to sixth in the Drivers’ championship, some 28 points adrift of leader Fabrizio Giovanardi who last year he fought so memorably for the title.
The 2001 champion said: “It’s was just a day full of annoying things which didn’t work and didn’t go our way, but which so nearly did. We’ve found some performance in the car and we continue to learn about it, but in many ways it’s just been a frustrating day to forget.”
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