Jason Plato

He's retired a little bit now from current racing.

A certain chap called Jason Plato.

[laughs] Yeah.

So we've got that quality, and that's an interview I can't wait to do.

So basically within six, seven months, you've gone from club car racer, enthusiast to super touring race driver, sharing the grid at Bathurst with British touring car stars, ex-Formula One drivers like Derek Warwick and, you know, Frank Bieler and Alain Meunier, who's the British touring car champion at the time.

Jason Plato, who was first year factory Renault driver and, Peter Brock, obviously he was part of the field, BMW guys, the Audi guys, the Volvo guys.

It wasn't a massive field, but when you look back on it, wow, it was stacked with some real quality.

It might not have had a big, long, huge grid of cars, but the guys who were in them by and large were stars at the time or became stars very quickly after that.

I'm

not sure obviously the first one with first win with Santa Procter in what was that 2018 that was a pretty decent day you know Jason Plato taking I think probably his last

win in the championship was with us wasn't it I should think that's cool

You know, Jason said quite a lot of nice things to us at the

i yeah i don't know if we did i don't know if we have discussed it no on you and i have discussed it in real life i don't know if we have

i don't know if we have on the pod no so what what basically occurred is at uh september last year um jason plato at The Silverstone round of the BTCC announced that he was putting together a team to compete in the 2026 season.

I remember it well.

I was there when he announced it.

So, To ensure that the team could continue competing, title sponsor CataClean stepped in with interim funding and the operation was restructured under the temporary name of CPRL.

The two drivers, Adam Morgan and Dan Rowbottom, remained with the team and they continued to race with the same cars, the Mercedes AMG A35s running with the support from RML and Toka, the organisation that runs BTCC, confirmed the programme would continue under a new management structure.

And the main surprise there was that Jason Plato was no longer involved in the ownership or management, despite being the founder of said project.

Yes.

I think maybe it was an Ariel Atom and a KTM X-Bow, maybe something else.

Um, and from memory you had Tiff there, you had Jason there, Jason Plato, Tiff Needell.

Great drivers, cool cars, on a racetrack.

And evidently some producer somewhere had said, "Okay, but this segment needs to appeal to a non-car audience.

And to be fair to them, the car, the drivers definitely did that going on to Donington Park.

However, it was a different outfit and the different guys that they would be running under because of the administrator news that came in between the two weekends and big movements behind the scenes that saw Jason Plato extricated from the team.

unfortunately.

Yeah, I mean, this has been the big touring car news.

I was interested in how it was going.

Now I've got no interest in watching it again.

there's not going to be enough people to go that suddenly only two people attending race weekends because the sport has existed before jason plato and will exist after jason plato however yes on the one hand good for the sport lots of lots of web columns lots of you know web inches taken up to talking about this podcast twitter's instagrams etc however it's still it's not good for the championship and it's i get your point but I don't think it is good publicity.

It's making a sport that's gone through the ringer in terms of publicity in the last couple of years with some of the changes it's made, some of the mismanagement of things it's done and some of the ways that drivers are finding it difficult to stay in and compete in this sport.

We don't know when everything started going over Plato.

Obviously, Friday, the touring cars, there was a lot of people waiting for Jason Plato.

He didn't turn up, really, until very late in the day.

But at the same time, that's not going to mean anything because Nick Hampton did the exact same thing, you know? People just stay in the hotel.

I'm going to get a Plato racing statement at the moment because it is quite an interesting one.

I'm not quite racing.

Jason Plato's statement.

So I'll just get up now, and I would read that if it was on Instagram, and it's not.

And this is because of what you're actually involved in, not just F1, because you're very involved in the British Touring Car Championship.

And there has been this news that Jason Plato is now no longer part of the team that he helped set up at the end of last year for going into this year.

So what have you been learning about all of that at Donington this last weekend? Oh.

As you can imagine, it's been a big topic of conversation at Donington.

Now, we understand that Cataclean have possibly stepped in to be able to keep people within their jobs, um, to be able to keep the team going for at least the rest of the season while they are still on the lookout for a new buyer.

But with that, obviously we have the announcement that Jason Plato would not be with the team for the rest of the season, and today we have seen a statement from him.

Yeah, so there's a fuller statement on his socials, but the one that was read out on ITV I shall just read for you here.

Yep.

That really shows how, uh, that Hyundai is this season.

Absolutely.

So just to cover off what I hinted there, so Jason Plato race, uh, racing is no more, you may have heard.

Uh, it is now called CPRL Racing, and they've had to start again with zero points.

In the second race, the Vauxhall driver inherited the lead on the last lap when race leader Fabrizio Giovinardi suffered a puncture.

Jason Plato won the third and final race of the weekend in his Seat.

World Rally Championship from Sardinia.

Victory for Sebastian Loeb.