Counting the cost at Jaguar Land Rover

As I write this, Jaguar Land Rover is at last starting to gear up again after its UK factories were brought to a shuddering halt at the end of August. It has cost the company hundreds of millions in lost production and possibly more, one estimate being as high as £1.5bn. And while we’re all brilliant after the fact, it will be ruing the day it decided not to take out insurance against just such a probably quite likely eventuality. Or, worse still, simply didn’t think of it.

But in future surely the aim is not to make sure your business is immune to the worst efforts of the criminal community because I expect that’s not possible, but to require so much time and effort to break in they give up and go elsewhere instead. When we lived in London a security expert came round to talk burglar alarms who rather honestly explained that the point was not to stop them getting in, but simply give the impression it’d be easier to break in next door instead. So we just bought a box with a flashing light, stuck it on the side of the house and slept in peace.

It’s great to see Jason Plato heading back to the BTCC grid for 2026, albeit now as a team owner rather than driver. I met up with him in London two days before the announcement was due to be made and while not everything is in the public domain – such as who will build the car – I can tell you that if all goes to plan it will certainly be a credible effort.

“If I say Jason Plato has had a tough time, I’m putting it as mildly as I can”

But he also spoke to me of what life has been like since he retired at the end of 2022 after 23 seasons, two championships, 97 wins and a start-to-podium ratio of one in three. And if I say he’s had a tough time, I’m putting it about as mildly as I can. He struggled with no longer being a racing driver, an identity he’d had for over 30 years, his work on Fifth Gear went away, on top of which he had other serious issues with which to try to come to terms both personally and professionally. It got to the stage – and I know he won’t mind me saying, as this part of our conversation was very much on the record – when he went home and took all the mirrors off the walls of his house.

The good news is that he’s on the mend now and says that in terms of what he’s been through, his recovery outstrips anything he achieved in racing. I’m sure he’d still describe himself as work in progress but it was great to see him on fine form again and we wish him all the best, not least for his new team’s fortunes in the BTCC next year.

A week after my chat with Jason I met up with Dario Franchitti at another event and it struck me that however hard Jason found no longer being a racing driver, at least that was his choice, while Dario had no choice at all, his career being ended by an accident not of his creation in 2013. So I asked him straight how difficult it had been and the essence of his reply was ‘I was so busy being grateful still to be alive I dealt with it pretty well.’ All a question of perspective I guess.

It occurred to me that I’ve just entered my 30th year of working for Motor Sport. I’d been on Autocar until six months before, then decided to go freelance but frankly it wasn’t really panning out too well. In September 1996, I earned the princely sum of £327. But Autocar owner Haymarket Publishing had kindly let me have a desk in the office while I found my feet, which is where I was when it bought a job lot including not just Motor Sport, but what was then known as Motoring News and the LAT photo archive. The rumour was that all it really wanted was the archive but it was an all-or-nothing deal so Motor Sport came too.

One day all the big cheeses filed into the meeting room the door of which just happened to be by my desk, the purpose of the meeting – unknown to me at the time – to find Motor Sport a new editor. And I’m sure it was because I just happened to be the last person they’d all spotted before entering the meeting that I was uppermost in their minds and was offered the job.

As you may know the title was not in a good state at the time and a curious condition of my employment was that I was under no circumstances to make it any better. They wanted a few months to relaunch it and as big a contrast between new and old as possible.

My very minor rebellion was to refuse to let myself be called ‘editor’ until we could make a magazine of which I could be truly proud. Which is why if you ferret out your early 1997 magazines, you’ll see me listed only as ‘acting editor’.

We re-launched in April with a track test of the unimprovably beautiful Ferrari 412 P and for the next three years I had the best job I’ve ever had. I can scarcely put into words how proud and happy I am still to be making monthly contributions to the finest motor-racing magazine there has or, indeed, will ever be.