JASON PLATO was not going to be denied at least one win in the Dunlop MSA Touring Car Championship at Croft, but he had to do it the hard way.

The Tyneside-raised racer suffered a repeat of the bad luck that struck the MG KX Momentum Racing team at the previous round at Oulton Park, when as the cars set off on the formation lap his MG6 suffered a series of problems and ended up behaving to be towed back into the pits.

He did make it back out onto the track, but only for a few ‘shakedown’ laps and as a result the Yuasa Racing Team Hondas of Matt Neal and Gordon Shedden were able to make hay.

Neal took victory in Race One to temporarily move to the top of the standings, only for Shedden to move back into top spot in Race Two.

Though Plato took the remaining race, it is Neal who sits in the No1 spot as the championship reaches its halfway break, albeit by just one point from his team-mate thanks to a fourth place finish and Shedden’s sixth.

Plato, third in the standings, was just delighted to be leaving Croft on a positive note.

“It transforms the day,” he said of the win. “Not just for me, but there’s 30 people here (in the team) and everybody by nature in this game is competitive. We hate losing and we hate it when things go wrong.

“It is really important to go away confident. We have learned something about the car, 110 percent we have a direction now on how to develop the car.

“What we managed to do in Race Three was to make some changes which will almost mimic where we are going to go and it’s transformed the car in terms of balance, the grip we have got etc.

“Next week we have a got a load of development parts coming, we have got a couple of tests and our championship fight will begin from Snetterton.

“But there is a second a lap left in my car, there’s massive potential in it and at the moment, because we haven’t got these key parts, we can’t extract it.”

Sat in second place and with teammate Andy Neate leading the race, Plato said he had given thought to settling for a potential team one-two, but couldn’t get the message to Neate.

“If I am really frank, as soon as I got behind, I did get on the radio and say to the team ‘tell Andy I am not going to fight, I am just going to sit here, let’s get away from the rest and then we will see what happens at the end of the race.

“But they couldn’t make radio contact with him and then within a lap I realised he was having tyre problems and I thought ‘look, I can’t mess around’ .

“While it would be nice to try and help us get the best result for the team, I have got to do my business, get past and make it decisive, get past him quickly, but also overtake him in such a way that it didn’t compromise him with the guys behind.”

Neal, meanwhile, was more than happy with his day’s work.

“It’s lovely to go into the break with one of us (Hondas) leading. It means we have got some bragging rights over the seven weeks, but it just means we have to carry extra weight at Snetterton, so there’s a long way to go yet,” he said.

“We had a tough Race Three, but it’s so tight round here anything can happen, but on the whole we have had a great weekend.”