PLATO: "TITLE WILL NEED A MIRACLE"
Jason Plato has admitted that, with just nine rounds to
go, beating Matt Neal to this year’s Dunlop MSA British
Touring Car Championship title is going to take “a miracle”,
although the SEAT driver refuses to give up while he has a
mathematical chance.
Plato, the 2001 champion, is 40 points behind Neal and will
seek to take another chunk out of the gap at the Knockhill
circuit in Scotland this coming Sunday (3 September).
At Snetterton two weeks ago Plato won twice in his SEAT Leon
to pull 14 points on Neal whose Team Halfords Honda still
kept going after four collisions to earn him valuable points.
Neal himself then added a victory in the day’s third
race.
Plato said: “Even if we have three fab weekends in
a row, at Knockhill, Brands Hatch and Silverstone, it’s
still going to need Matt to have a lot of bad luck.
“His Honda is a tank – it has the ability to
be T-boned and drive into the side of you at 70mph and get
away with it. I don’t wish bad luck on anybody, but
that’s what it’s going to be. It would need a
miracle and you can’t manufacture those.
“At the moment I’m not really thinking of the
Drivers’ title – winning the Manufacturers’
championship for SEAT is the number one priority.”
Plato, though, believes the tight, twisty Knockhill circuit
could work to the advantage of his SEAT’s renowned handling
capabilities.
He added: ”The end of the lap we can forget –
a tight hairpin and then a long hill. We’ll lose out
up there.
“The trick has got to be to get the car working as
well as possible around the rest of the lap and if we can
really maximise it then that might, over a complete lap, give
us an edge.
“Unless we qualify on the front row it’s going
to be very hard to get in a position to overtake. But if we
really make the car perform as well as we know it can be then
we might just be in with a shout…”
|
