MG KX Momentum drivers Jason Plato and Sam Tordoff have both pledged to get their winning campaigns back on track at Rockingham in three weeks after a tough time in the latest rounds of the British Touring Car Championship at Knockhill in Scotland last weekend.
Both drivers struggled to get to grips with the handling of the two-litre turbocharged MG6 over the demands of the tight 1.2-mile circuit in Fife and were unable to challenge for wins over the course of the three races.
Plato’s best result was a fourth position in the first of the three races, while Tordoff brought his car home in the top ten twice before an alternator failure ruled him out of the third encounter.
Plato said he and the team were at a loss to explain why the events north of the border were such a struggle. He explained: “We tried so many different things with the car over the course of the weekend to get the car to react positively, but we just couldn’t get it to handle the way I liked.
“It was very frustrating and it shows that we still have to work hard – and by that I mean myself, the team and all the engineers. We have got to completely erase the memory of this weekend and think about Rockingham because we have got a set-up which we know works there. We dominated race one at that circuit last year and we have just got to think about winning some races.”
Tordoff, in his maiden season in the British Touring Car Championship, said he too had struggled to get the most from the front-wheel-drive car. He finished ninth and eighth in the opening rounds before an alternator failure in the third left him stranded as the cars lined up to start the race.
But the 24-year-old Yorkshire ace shared Plato’s frustrations with the set-up of the hatchback. He said: “We never got on top of the car,” he said. “We struggled through to two top tens and then in race three we had a car fault.
“We don’t know why our pace was so far adrift at Knockhill. Over the course of the weekend, we had changed massive things on the car and it has not had any effect. We were outside of the window to get the car to work well and when you are out of that, the car doesn’t respond to changes.”
Team principal Ian Harrison said that the unique challenges of the undulating Knockhill track had made it difficult to perfect the car, but he was confident that the crew would bounce back in the next event on September 15.
“Nobody wants to come here and just make the numbers up, least of all us,” said Harrison “It is not what we do. We have got to find out why the set-up was not good at Knockhill. In the last race meeting we did at Snetterton, we were almost untouchable so we shouldn’t lose sight of that.
“It is our worst performance this year in terms of out and out pace and it is the only circuit that we race on with those particular characteristics. That is no excuse because we should be able to hook the car up like some of the other teams hook the car"
