July 2024 at The Dorchester in Park Lane, London. The glitterati arrive for a Motor Sport celebration dinner, held in honour of the centenary of the magazine you are reading. And it also provides a major catalyst in the rehabilitation of Jason Plato from a crushing depression.

Double British Touring Car champion Plato, whose tally of 97 race wins remains a series record, is today at the helm of his own team Plato Racing, which has entered the series in 2026 fielding a pair of Mercedes-AMG A35 Saloons for Dan Rowbottom and Adam Morgan. But two years ago, he was a retired racing driver struggling to cope with the “cataclysmic events” life had thrown at him.

“I was embarrassed, I was ashamed, I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t let anyone in,” he recounts of his existence since he’d hung up his helmet at the end of 2022. “I tried to kill myself twice in a mainline train tunnel. I was that bad.”

Partly, this was a comedown from almost four and a half decades of competition since Plato had started karting aged 11. “Emotion is the enemy,” he explains of his sporting mindset. “Not only is it the enemy inside a racing car, but in the paddock, when I’m at work. And I became really brilliant at just not allowing it ever to come into my system, until I was at home, and then I’d become a different sort of bloke.”

He was fêted on his send-off at the 2022 BTCC finale at Brands Hatch, but other monsters were rearing their heads: “My TV work [on Fifth Gear] just stopped – broadcasters thought, ‘We don’t want to pay for this any more.’ Sizeable chunks of my money went pear-shaped although I knew that was happening anyway because I was involved with some high-risk investments. And the final straw was my wife decided to end the marriage.

“It completely blew me apart. It’s not so much that I’d conned myself; I thought since the age of 11 that emotion was the enemy and it didn’t even get into my psyche. I wouldn’t cognitively push it away – I just didn’t recognise it, my receptors for that stuff had been shut down. I was living in a dark cottage, it all went wrong and I found myself in such a dreadful place. I didn’t leave the house for six months; I took the mirrors down.”

Compounding this was Plato’s neurodiversity, originally recognised when his elder daughter was assessed for “some unusual traits. And guess what, I’ve got quite a few of those! Most of my pals within my world, whether that be engineers, aerodynamicists, designers, a couple of the drivers – they’re the best in their field but they’re on the spectrum. I firmly believe this: it is a special power provided you don’t have too much of it, and then it can be harmful.

“Most of my pals within my world, they’re the best in their field but they’re on the spectrum”

“Look at a big oak tree: there’s all different colours of leaves but they’re basically green, aren’t they? Imagine that’s your brain, and you might have a little orange patch over there. That’s fine, but it can give you special powers that could be intense focus, be able to push emotion away, be a loner. But if there’s too much of it, it harms your livelihood and who are you are as a person, and then you can’t use your special powers.”

Plato tried therapy, but “my opinion was, ‘What do these bloody people know about me? How can they advise me?’ My greatest consistent piece of rhetoric with these people was, ‘Look, I don’t want grey, I want black or white. I want a zero or one. Right or wrong.’ Of course, life isn’t like that, but it is in my mind, and this is one of the downsides of having a non-neurotypical brain. I thought, stupidly, ‘I’ll sort this out.’”

Worried friends were calling, and Plato was already beginning to self-heal when his old pal, former rally driver and Driven co-presenter Penny Mallory, suggested a new path. Her journey to success from teenage homelessness in London had made her an in-demand keynote speaker. “She said, ‘Mate you’ve got to do it, you’ve got a brilliant story and you’re much better known than I am,’” recalls Plato. “It’s pressure to perform, and the other great thing is if you’ve done a great job… instant adulation, gratification, a bit like winning a race. By and large, the cheques – and these are nice cheques – are paid before you even get there. And unlike my career, the older you get the better you get, because you have gravitas and life experience.”

Deborah Tee was calling too. Her late grandfather Wesley was Motor Sport proprietor from 1936-97 and, in her long-time communications role, she had been tasked with assembling many of the stars for the magazine’s centenary bash.

“She was saying, ‘Come on JP, let me help you, you’ve got to come to this thing’ – and she wouldn’t bloody leave it alone!” chuckles Plato. “I said, ‘Look Deborah, I will come, I’m probably not going to stay for long, please put me on a table in the back row next to some of my mates.’”

This was a big deal: venturing out after self-enforced solitude. Then… near-disaster. “I go to the reception desk and… I don’t suffer from anxiety but I was all of a mess. And it was, ‘Jason Plato, no you’re not on the list,’ and I nearly went bloody orbital. I very nearly just turned round and walked out. ‘I can’t cope with this, this is a step too far.’ And a guy approached me: ‘Sorry, we’ve had a mess-up, it’s not a problem, there is a seat for you.’ And of course it was my fault – I hadn’t responded with an RSVP so it hadn’t hit the system. I was sat on a table with my kind of people, and I genuinely had a really lovely evening. I was near the front of the room but that made it more special because I was surrounded by the great and the good, and it was the first time in quite some months I felt lucky to be here. It was a beautiful experience and I was in awe of the stars in the room.”

One was Ross Brawn, whose eponymous team had taken Jenson Button to the F1 title in 2009. Brawn and Plato had been part of
a close-knit group called The Inner Circle that met on Zoom for drinks and general yakking during Covid lockdowns: “I stood up to go out for a smoke, and Ross stood up and shot over to me and we had a real big hug. And he said, ‘How are you? We’re all really worried about you.’ We had a chat and he said, ‘Please come round for supper, come and stay over.’”

Plato told his friend of his keynote speaking ambition, and it turned out that Brawn knew just the man: “He put me in touch with Mike Kelly. He’s an actor, but he does coaching for on-stage actors and keynote speakers, and he helps write scripts. He helped Nick Fry at Brawn GP. You never get to this bloke unless you find him through someone like Ross. I met Mike, liked his style, he got me completely, and we spent the best part of 2025 honing, writing, doing workshops together. I even pulled in favours at the BRDC so I could use their press conference theatre and PA system at Silverstone so I could practise and run through the script.”

And Kelly, unwittingly (or perhaps not), became the final building block for Plato’s recuperation. “In order to get to that point, to hone that speech and to delve into really crazy personal stuff and be prepared to say it, we had to practise that,” he explains. “And do you know what? He was my therapist. Even though he wasn’t. I had to speak openly to him about it and I felt no guilt, no embarrassment, nothing. And his response to the very deep personal things I was telling him was, ‘Mate, this is an amazing speech.’”

Simultaneously, despite initial reluctance on Plato’s part, he was tempted back into the sport by his chum Rowbottom as team principal. The Midlander was itching to leave the Alliance Racing-run NAPA Ford squad after three years there, and he too had been through turbulence off-track – in his case, open-heart surgery in late 2024 that he wasn’t guaranteed to survive. ‘Rowbo’ recovered, regained fitness, and became a near-mirror image of Plato. “I wear my heart on my sleeve, and I say it how it is,” admits Plato. “I realised that because of my character, and my journey into motor sport, there was much more mileage, impact and column inches by leaning forward and embracing the villain, which also meant embracing who I am – a bit of a maverick.” Much of that applies to post-op Rowbottom, who along with top brass from his sponsor Cataclean is a director of Plato Racing.

Occupying the other seat is the amiable Morgan, like Rowbottom a seasoned BTCC race winner. The long-time business of the Lancastrian’s family is Ciceley Commercials – a Mercedes truck and van dealership giant that fits nicely with the choice of the German manufacturer’s A35 Saloon for the track.

The season started well, with Rowbottom taking victory in the qualifying race at the Donington Park opener. But results slipped thereafter, Morgan’s fifth at Snetterton the best in a full-points Sunday race over the first four weekends. With just a half-day shakedown at the MIRA proving ground before the three days of official pre-season tests, it’s still early for the A35, produced by long-time touring car powerhouse RML, for which Plato drove in the BTCC when he raced SEATs and Chevrolets.

“Had it not been for Ross, had it not been for that dinner, it could have gone a different way”

“Our car is different in design and concept to all the other touring cars out there,” muses Plato. “We’ve got to learn to extract the performance. We went down a couple of blind alleys in terms of set-up, and we have been particularly unlucky with some mechanical gremlins which aren’t of our making: we’ve had crank sensors go and overboosting.

“Adam at Brands Hatch was in a great place in race one and then fired off, big damage, and that screws the weekend up. We’ve got pace at the beginning of the race, we just seem to be suffering with some degradation, not just chassis but for some reason our engines are not working as well as they should after lap three. We’re unpicking that now, but we are definitely making progress with the chassis.”

Plato also reveals that the drivers are not getting the feedback they require from the brakes: “They feel that they’re going to lock the fronts all the time, so they’re not as aggressive on the brakes as they should be. But I know that our car can take more clamping force without locking up. In the fast corners our car is arguably the best on the grid, but in slow corners we’re leaving a bit there.”

And the keynote speaking? Plato made his public bow in front of 400 people: “There were men in tears and I thought, ‘Bloody hell, I love this.’ Had it not been for Ross, had it not been for that dinner, it could have gone a different way. Not only was it an amazing burst back into life for me going to that centenary, but I was so proud to be invited to that do. In a weird way, I owe some gratitude to Deborah Tee and to Motor Sport for my recovery.”