1,000 Greatest Drivers: Jason Plato

Protégé of So-crates; enemy of Matt Neal; career compiler par excellence.

Here is a driver where what I wrote doesn’t seem to match my grades very much as I’m pretty harsh in my writing but pretty generous in terms of the grades. The reason for that is that I feel Plato has a reputation as the BTCC’s greatest driver that isn’t entirely earned because he was the winningest driver largely due to his dominance in an era that did not have great competition. As I reveal in my column, Plato ranks only 23rd of 31 BTCC champions in my teammate model and his rival Matt Neal (the second-winningest driver in BTCC history) only ranked 26th. I acknowledge both of them are probably underrated in part because they both raced into their 50s and had some extremely bad seasons late in their career that are arguably weighing them down, but that isn’t the only issue. I also just think they quite frankly weren’t as good as most of the wave of drivers from continental Europe who dominated the series in the ‘90s and 2000s including Gabriele Tarquini, Frank Biela, Rickard Rydell, Alain Menu, Laurent Aïello, Yvan Muller, and Fabrizio Giovanardi. Almost all these drivers won major championships elsewhere while Plato and Neal didn’t and they seemed to collect wins almost by default after the other better drivers left. I don’t think the BTCC had competition as strong as the WTCC or Supercars or DTM in that period, so that’s why I’m not giving Plato or Neal any top five seasons. Having said that, it’s still hard to argue that a guy who won at least 6 races every year for a ten year period in a major league series wasn’t an elite driver all that time, so I did at least give him E or E- grades, but I just think he doesn’t have the top-tier peak of a number of those other drivers, but he sometimes seems to have a higher reputation which doesn’t quite seem earned. I’m still giving him a lot of elite seasons, but his run at the absolute top is probably shorter than you might think. Much like Alex Zanardi, I’m not refusing to acknowledge his elite seasons. I just think the legend is overblown. And I think I agree with Plato that when all is said and done, Ashley Sutton will clearly be the best BTCC driver. (He might already be as he’s led BTCC drivers in my model five times while Plato only did once.)