Spectacular crashes have always been a large part of BTCC’s appeal. And even in this health and safety age it doesn’t disappoint. Check out the series victory record holder Jason Plato flying off in his Cruze. Awesome!
Plato didn’t have a brilliant weekend to be honest. In race one he had a puncture and in race two this massive crash. After a coming together between Gordon Shedden’s Honda, Rob Austin’s Audi and Liam Griffin’s Ford on Lap One, Plato was knocked from behind onto the gravel at the Craner Curves. The car slid across the infield before mounting a bank and flipping up into the air, rolling three times before coming to rest on its remaining three wheels.
Fortunately that roll cage was bolted on properly on Jason’s car and saved his life. As you see in the pictures, the car was a total wreck after the crash, but amazingly the RML team’s mechanics managed to rebuild it for the next race of the weekend!
Team manager, Rod Underwood, said: “We had to give it our best shot. We didn’t think there was a hope of getting the car out at first, but somehow it all came together and we did it. I’m still not quite sure how – two hours to fully rebuild a car, most of it was broken!”
“It was amazing,” added Plato. “It looked an impossible task, the car looked like a Transformer, but the lads were just amazing, you could see the passion in everybody. They’re the best racing team in the world, forget F1. That was teamwork – I had tears in my eyes, they had tears in their eyes, and to see their commitment makes up for all the bad weekends we’ll ever have. There was real emotion out there today.”