Autosport are doing a SuperTouring focus special during this week. Here are a couple of articles which I thought would interest everyone, the first is on Matt Neal and the second on Jason Plato (who comes across very likeable throughout).
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Matt Neal: king of the independents
As part of our celebration of Super Touring, JAMIE O'LEARY caught up with BTCC star Matt Neal to look back at his time as a privateer hero in the 1990s
By Jamie O'Leary
AUTOSPORT reports editor
Winning in the BTCC was hard enough during the 1990s even if you had manufacturer machinery, so imagine what it was like if you were a privateer. Matt Neal doesn't have to, he was there. And he became comfortably the era's leading independent.
"The first few years I had in the BTCC, I'd have done double backflips just to get into the top 10," says the now three-time champion and mainstay of the factory Honda squad.
"That's how difficult it was for a privateer team against the works boys. These guys who win a race nowadays from a reversed-grid pole and with minimum weight - they haven't got a clue about just how hard it was for us to do what we did."
During what is universally acknowledged as the series' high-point, the decadent era of big-budget Super Touring machinery, the task he faced in clawing his way from back-of-the-grid obscurity to the top step of the podium was nothing short of superhuman.
That he managed it, and in the most Hollywood of fashions on live TV, is testament to the dogged determination of the lanky midlander and the entire Team Dynamics outfit - now running the aforementioned Honda programme - to never quit, no matter how tough the going got.
Neal was the star of the privateers' category - known then as the TOCA Cup and backed for a number of years by French fuel giant Total - winning it in 1993, '95, '99 and 2000 in BMW, Ford and Nissan machinery. Already a favourite among the fans, he became a cult hero during the latter part of the era by regularly putting his Primera GT where a non-works machine had no right.
"People's champion? Yeah, I guess I was, and I admit, I did play up to it," he says. "Everyone loves to see an underdog doing well and when we were up near the front in 1999 and 2000, the way the fans got behind us was just amazing.
"During the pitlane autograph sessions we'd be getting similar crowds to the works boys. It was a bit different when I came back as a works driver with Vauxhall a couple of years later and got booed at Brands Hatch!"
Neal, already a star name in Group N saloon racing, made three appearances in the BTCC in 1991 in Pyramid, TechSpeed and Roy Kennedy-run BMWs, and then under the auspices of Dave Lampit "out of the very unit in Pershore we now occupy as Honda Racing" the following season.
The move that was to set up the rest of the decade came with the formation of Team Dynamics - to run ex-Vic Lee Racing kit - by Neal's father Steve at the end of '92.
"I turned down the Vauxhall Cavalier to do that too," Neal remembers. "It was probably the wrong thing to do, given how we struggled to get an overall result for so many years. But I'd been on BMW Junior Team tests and figured that by aligning myself with them, that I'd have a better chance of a works drive somewhere down the line."
The BMW years were successful enough within the context of privateer competition; the '92 crown was narrowly lost to James Kaye while he did take the independents' title the following season as part of a three-car Dynamics line-up alongside Ray Bellm and Alex Portman.
After a brief sojourn as a Mazda works driver in '94 - a year blighted by a huge accident at Silverstone that caused him to miss a handful of races, and the team's withdrawal mid-season - Neal was back within the family fold.
"We [Dynamics] got told about four weeks before the start of the season that Graff Racing in France were looking to offload one of their Mondeos on the cheap," Neal recalls. "So [long-time Dynamics technical guru] Barry Plowman and I attached a trailer to the back of my car, drove down to France and collected the car. Big-budget stuff!
"And then we won the class first time out at Donington. Fantastic. But that car was good for two reasons; firstly we had a dynamite Cosworth engine and secondly Dunlop - which was down to just Volvo in terms of works teams - helped us out a bit with the tyres and made sure we had rubber that was only one stage below their best.
"We won the title comfortably, but best of all was coming 11th out of 55 cars at the World Cup at Paul Ricard in October."
After a disastrous follow-up season as a two-car operation with 1990 BTCC champ Robb Gravett alongside Neal, Dynamics switched to Nissans midway through 1997 and ran with Primeras of varying specification and age until the end of the Super Touring era.
This, coupled with the arrival of gifted engineer David Potter and the end of a control-tyre deal for the privateers that kept them out of the overall hunt, launched Neal towards the sharp end.
"By that point both me and the team - and even my sponsors - had outgrown the independents' race and we wanted to go after the big boys," he says. "Trouble was, your Gianni Morbidellis and Derek Warwicks - the ex-F1 guys - don't like being beaten by the pikey privateer, so I ended up not even winning the indie title for a couple of years because I'd go after the big boys and end up getting shoved off.
"I had to sacrifice good results and have the odd accident to show these guys that I couldn't be bullied off the track. But you only had to do it once and they got the message."
And then came Donington Park on April 5, 1999, and a famous maiden victory.
"That was the first time we had the same tyres available to us as the works teams, and look what we managed," he says.
"To be on pole, lead, stall in the pits and then come back from fifth to win during the final third of the race... magic. And of course there's the famous picture of Alan Gow handing me the cheque for £250,000 for being the first privateer to win a BTCC race in Super Touring - that was just under a third of our budget for the year when the works Nissan team were spending £12 million!
"There's been some good success for us since then; winning the last international Super Touring race at Estoril in 2001 against the works Alfas and Hondas, and having the three BTCC championships, but that one race at Donington is still the one I get asked about most often and the one I cherish above all others."
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Part of the family: Plato's BTCC debut
Jason Plato on his initiation into the British Touring Car Championship, and the Williams Renault team that gave him his start and his first win
By Marcus Simmons
AUTOSPORT chief sub-editor
Jason Plato had no idea what he'd got himself into. Yes, he'd decided he would do almost anything to land himself his last-chance British Touring Car Championship drive with the Williams Renault team - his tale of doorstepping Frank Williams is well known.
And, yes, he knew he'd be quick - he'd already proven that by outperforming the ex-Formula 1 opposition he was up against for the deal.
And, yes, competing in the BTCC - with eight manufacturers awash in corporate cash - was, especially for a British driver, second only to getting an F1 ride.
Even arriving at the Williams factory to meet the guys didn't really prepare him. "I'd imagined what it would be like to drive for Williams," he says, "and when I signed the documents and did the negotiations with Frank, that was an amazing part of my life, as was turning up as a driver and being allowed behind closed doors."
Then came the real eye-opener: an intensive test at Jarama. Days and days of thrashing around with Undisputed Renault Number One Alain Menu...
"I had an articulated lorry full of tyres," he says. "Just for me! All different compounds. Unbelievable. Engineers around me, analysing everything. One guy who was only there to analyse the front dampers; others for this and that.
"I thought I was in heaven. I was like a kid in a sweetie shop, and there was Alain, taking it all in his stride."
There was initiation, too. Here was a 29-year-old new boy, reigning Renault Spider champion, known as a bit of a Jack the Lad, a little bolshie perhaps. The Williams boys had a plan...
"Every evening, after the testing, something had been done to my hire car," laughs Plato. "They wired the horn to the brake pedal and handbrake - you can imagine what that was like once I got into Madrid on the way back to the hotel.
"They drilled the headlights out and filled them full of oxyacetylene, so they'd explode; they put talcum powder in the air vents. And one morning half of my car was in the swimming pool.
"But it was done with such humour and friendliness, and the more they did the more I loved it. I saw it as my opportunity to integrate myself into the team. It was, 'Come on lads, what are you going to do now?'"
Plato's place in the BTCC was very much the culmination of a plan hatched in late 1995 but, which he admits now, had "a lot of hoops to jump through".
Since his single-seater career ran out of steam, he had sat out '94 and most of '95, but some sponsorship cash and a lot of good advice from his friends at Renault UK pointed him towards the Spider Cup in '96. He dominated.
"I knew that Will Hoy's contract was up at the end of '96," says Plato, "so I thought there was a half-door open. I could see these pieces in the jigsaw at the end of '95 that would fit together if it all worked out."
It meant the desperate drive to the Williams factory to confront Frank Williams (that doorstepping incident), even after excelling in his Spider Cup prize test in the BTCC Laguna, and his subsequent pace in what the team vainly tried to insist was not a shootout, "but it all fell into place. The planets aligned".
Funnily enough, it wasn't Plato's first flirtation with the BTCC. In '94, he tested for the Nissan team run by his uncle Jan O'dor's Janspeed operation.
"Kieth O'dor was my cousin, and my single-seater career had gone a bit pear-shaped," he says. "My first time was at Pembrey, doing some aero testing because Eric van de Poele wasn't available. I did a good job and they said, 'Let's get him back.'
"I integrated myself into the team and there seemed a glimmer of hope, because I thought when Eric departed there was the possibility of a seat. And then Nissan pulled out of the BTCC.
"Before that, it hadn't been on my radar, but those tests with Nissan excited me about touring cars. I'd always viewed it as something old people do; I'd still had the dream of being an F1 driver."
Three years later, he was a young man in the BTCC and, once the Jarama japery was out of the way, there was the serious business of a season to contest. Incredibly, Plato earned pole for his first three races, but in hindsight the sensation of this - while it had its upside - perhaps prolonged the wait for his first win.
"That was down to Williams giving me the opportunity at those tests," he says. "Tyres, diffs... I knew all of that, and it enabled me to go out and extract the maximum from the car in qualifying.
"There was a lot of green-eyed monster about my getting the drive, but I genuinely beat Alain to those three poles, and that was the best thing that happened. It earned me respect in the paddock and, more importantly, within the team. I'd justified the decision of Frank and Patrick Head, which in most people's opinions had been a reckless one.
"But it did give me a slightly bigger spring in my step that perhaps I shouldn't have had. I had a lot of money coming into my bank account, got a Ferrari, was able to pick up birds, I was a superstar. But I wasn't, because it also made Alain turn his wick up and as a result I was slower than my team-mate.
"Normally, you'd come in and be four-tenths off, then three-tenths, two, and be making progress all the time. With me, it happened in reverse.
"That irked me, and I started to tie myself in knots and overdrive. I had a couple of accidents I shouldn't have had. Patrick had a chat with me and said, 'You're trying too hard, let it come, you don't have to prove yourself, relax. We like you, you're doing a good job.'"
Plato also had a bright young engineer in the form of fellow Williams new boy Gerry Hughes, who had jumped across from working with James Thompson on the RML Vauxhalls. Since the Williams days, Hughes has worked in F1 with Jaguar, Jordan, Red Bull, Super Aguri and Cosworth, with Status GP/Team Ireland in A1GP and now with Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing in IndyCar.
Hughes fitted into a remarkable engineering pyramid at Williams that included designer John Russell (now in charge at Triple 8 Australia), Menu's engineer Mark Ellis (now part of Red Bull's design team) and, towards the base of that pyramid, Rob 'Felipe, Fernando is faster than you' Smedley. Before the '99 season, Dominic Harlow (ex-Force India and Williams F1 engineer) joined, too.
"Gerry is incredibly bright, technical, precise," states Plato. "We're still good mates. He was really good for me, to demonstrate how diligently and in-depth you had to work.
"From the outside looking in, Mark wore the pants in his relationship with Alain, so I let Gerry wear the pants in ours. I put my complete trust in the engineers, letting them learn in a mathematical way what I wanted and then make the call.
"But that's only possible when you have a team like Willy's. A guy came up to me in February '97 and said, 'Hello, can I be your data engineer?' I said, 'Of course you can.' It was Rob Smedley - he ended up being the best man at my wedding. The brainpower these guys have got... we might think we're clever if we crack The Times crossword puzzle, but they're on a different planet. Rob's a genius."
That first win finally came on a hot summer day at Snetterton. Plato led home Menu - whose second place secured him the title - and Honda's Gabriele Tarquini in tight formation. It was a good drive, and the new boy had shrugged off throttle and clutch problems, as well as a slow puncture, but it didn't seem to flow in the manner of a Menu victory.
"If I'm honest, yeah, I was a bit tight in the car," he admits. "But I knew it was a brilliant chance and I knew the psychological dynamic. As long as he finished in the leading places, Alain was going to wrap it up, and I knew he wouldn't try anything risky. There was no need to let that happen, to stop me winning that race. There was a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes."
Here Plato alludes to team strategy. OK, it was natural for him to play a supporting role to Menu until the Swiss won the title, but as the end-of-season run-in began there was a real chance of the British rookie wresting second in the points from Audi star Frank Biela.
It came to a head in the final round at Silverstone, in the first of the two races, when Menu shouldered race leader Plato aside and, in doing so, let the Nissan of Anthony Reid through into second.
"We'd had a discussion that Alain was going to try to help me," recalls Plato. "But - and this was a mega lesson - there was an awful lot of greyness. At no point did anyone say that at all costs my second place in the championship should be protected - it was just implied.
"I respect Alain enormously for this - he was in it for himself, and would a rookie taking second place in the championship take something away from his win? All drivers are selfish bastards, and he did it because he wasn't told explicitly not to.
"I was fuming. I felt so let down. I had a go at everyone - at the team, the team manager [Didier Debae], Renault UK, Alain. Alain slammed the door on his way out. In the final race, my mindset was very different. It was gloves off, Alain was now my number-one enemy, and from my perspective it was a really sweet victory."
This was a fantastic Plato performance. Running on red mist, he held off a charging Menu, the two Renaults miles clear of the field. Win number two, and valuable lessons on the same day.
Menu, acknowledges Plato, had also given a masterclass in political savvy all year. "I owe Alain a lot, actually," he admits.
"Alain in those days was the best touring car driver in the world, operating in the best team in the world. And when I say he was the best, and I mean the best at everything.
"Caroline [Menu's wife] was a really important part of his armoury and his family worked as a unit. The way they worked together at social engagements with Renault people and key sponsors was a bit frustrating because I didn't have the second language, or the pretty, intelligent wife. I couldn't operate at their level.
"Alain was very strategic. He was very rarely off his guard and very rarely not up to something. I don't mean he was being sneaky, it's just that he always had an end goal. No matter how personal or light-hearted, there was an agenda with everything.
"That's how Alain went about his business. I learned very quickly. It's a very complex thing, this motor racing, and you have to think about it even when you're asleep."
For '98 the Renaults were not as competitive, but Plato stepped up, and this was no master-and-reluctant-servant relationship with Menu.
"For a good proportion of the '98 season I was a match for Alain," he says, "but as soon as we drove the car we felt that it wasn't as good, whereas some of the opposition had really moved on.
"I'd improved in my confidence, where I was in my contribution. I knew the tell-tale signs of pushing too hard. You develop alarms in your system to alert you when you're going off the rails, and that makes you perform better. That's why good touring car drivers are ones who perform year in, year out. It's like having a muscle memory."
In '99, there was a further decline in Williams Renault competitiveness, and now, with Menu off to Ford, Plato was leading the team. Just as in '97 and '98 he was a race winner, but if anything the performances were more impressive even if results were poorer.
"We didn't quite have the car," he sighs. "We had designers moving on... John Russell had penned the '97 car [before moving to Williams's BMW Le Mans project], Mark Ellis went to Ford with Alain. We just didn't produce the goods, but..."
Plato pauses, knowing that it's too simplistic and unfair to blame the form from '99 purely on the design of the car. "Perhaps me and Jean-Christophe Boullion weren't doing a good enough job," he offers.
Unfair to blame the drivers, too (Harlow says today that they were performing to an extremely high standard). Yet telling that, even 14 years later, he doesn't want to lay the responsibility at one door, such is the fondness with which he regards everyone from the team.
As it was, Plato gained further kudos in '99 by comfortably outpacing Boullion, the man he'd been given the nod over in the first place for '97.
Talking of which, those Williams guys weren't going to let Plato finish his 'initiation' year without another prank.
"I almost used to live at the factory in Didcot," he says. "I was there nigh on every day of the week. I just thought I could do a better job by immersing myself in that environment.
"I'd be shooting the breeze with the machinists, trying to make things. I'm a closet geek - it wasn't a chore for me!
"How they did this without my knowledge is truly amazing... There were 50 or 60 of them, all my mates, and they must have started it in the middle of the year on the QT. They'd constructed this Renault Laguna shell and tig-welded every bent, damaged body panel they could find from my season.
"We were testing in Spain a couple of weeks before Christmas, and Heathrow Terminal 1 had caught fire, so we got rerouted to Birmingham, but we then had to travel back to Heathrow to pick up our cars.
"It was about 11.30 or midnight when I walked into my back garden. To the left I had this rockery area with a patio, and as I walked in I clocked this touring car. It took me another two or three steps of walking before my brain reacted: 'What the hell is that?'
"They'd hired a crane to lift it over the roof of the house. It sat there for nine months and I wanted to convert the bonnet into a barbecue, but the next-door neighbours got me to remove it because it was an eyesore. It cost me £700 to have it craned out!
"I gave it to a friend, Rich Stoodley [a rally driver], to auction for charity, and it got a couple of grand."
More importantly, the gag was further proof of the new boy's security at Williams, with the 'miscreants' all invited to the Plato gaff for drinks and a laugh the following day.
"I really did feel part of the family," he smiles. And, by his performances, the same was true of his place in the BTCC.
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