Jason Plato got the chance to step back in time earlier this week when he swapped seats with Jack Sears, the first ever title winner in the British Touring Car Championship, at
Silverstone.
Plato, champion in 2001, was given the chance to take to the track in Sears' Austin Westminster A105 while Sears himself had the opportunity to head out onto the circuit in a 2008 SEAT Leon Cupra after the pair expressed a desire to sample machinery for each others era when they met at Silverstone back in June.
“It was fun actually,” Plato told
Crash.net afterwards. “The lovely thing about these old cars is when you get in them you can still smell wood and leather, that old smell, and you imagine that Inspector Morse's car will smell like that. In its day that was an iconic car; it was a rum old beast back then. It was interesting stuff.
“The nice thing was it was just good to be able to spend a bit of time with Jack, because he's a wonderful, very English man. Being out there with him on the track, it didn't take long before his eyes were back into seeing the racing line, and he was making little adjustments each lap. It was great to see. I hope I still have that passion and enthusiasm for driving cars quickly when I'm 78!”
Plato added that it was hard to try and compare the cars from the two different eras, considering that the BTCC back in the late 50's was for cars much closer to their road-going counterparts. Indeed a number of drivers – Sears included – used their race cars on the road.
“Modern race cars, with all of their aerodynamic accoutrements, lets' say, certainly add a little bit of aggression to it, whereas the Westminster is a fifties car and it's quite sculpted, quite smooth,” he said. “There is no comparison really, is there.
