Inside Jason Plato's grand plan to dominate the BTCC - again

BTCC 2026 020 "We want to create the finest racing team ever for a national championship. We want to take the British Touring Car Championship by storm and be incredibly successful. We want to dominate and blow everyone's doors off – and that's what we will do.

" Yes, in case you haven't noticed, Jason Plato is back in the BTCC . And he's being, well, very 'Jason Plato' about it. The two-time champion, who won a record 97 races as the overblown character fans both loved and hated (often at the same time), retired from driving at the end of 2022 and consistently made it very clear, in his preferred brand of colourful language, that he had zero interest in making the transition to team ownership.

Yet now, as another BTCC season kicks off at Donington Park this Sunday, there he will be on the pitwall, chief of bright and shiny Plato Racing. It's the big story of 2026. "I genuinely didn't want to do this," he insists, dragging deeply on a cigarette when Autocar finally pins him down in the smoking hut outside his new team's HQ in Wellingborough at the end of a chaotic, celebrity-strewn team launch (close friends Sir Chris Hoy and Ross Brawn among the guests).

"But I'm doing it my way, which is different from the way most people do it. " That's a rare understatement from Plato. From a seed of an idea last summer – "we didn't even have a bank account last August" – the 58-year-old has assembled a crack team of experienced BTCC old hands to help him.