News

from Classic and Competition Car 146 November 2022

CSCC Silverstone Spectacular

Is this the future of High Performance motoring?

The Rimac Nevera has recently won various awards, including GQ’s Hypercar of the year and the Top Gear Best Electric Performance Car award. Electric Hypercars are a new and different breed of high performance car, unlocking new levels in road car performance. The Rimac Nevera has the equivalent of 1,914 hp produced by four bespoke Rimac engineered electric motors, The car can accelerate from 0-60 mph in just 1.85 seconds and can reach 100 mph in 4.3 seconds, It was recently named as the fastest accelerating car in the World, achieving the standing Quarter mile in a World record breaking seconds 8.582 seconds. The car has been designed and developed by Rimac Automobili in Croatia. The name comes from an unexpected summer storm off the coast of Croatia. This is reflected in the car which can switch from a comfortable Grand Tourer to a high performance sports car in an instant. The Rimac group is led by CEO Mate Rimac and is the majority shareholder in Bugatti. This means that the group brings together the two most advanced Hypercars in the World. The Rimac Group is located on the outskirts of Zagreb in Croatia and has other facilities located around Europe and currently employs more than 1.300 people. In 2023 they will be moving to new state-of-theart Rimac Campus, large enough to accommodate over 2.500 people.

BTCC legend Jason Plato retired from BTCC racing after the recent final rounds at Brands Hatch in October. In a racing career that started in the late 1980’s in karting, he progressed through Formula 3 and Formula Renault, including a championship

title in the 1996 Renault Spider Championship. Born in 1967 in Oxford, he raced for 8 different BTCC teams during a British Touring Car career that spanned 24 seasons in the series. During this period he did have a two year break whilst racing in the ASCAR series as a potential route into the US NASCAR series but a drive opportunity never materialised. In 1997, Plato was given a BTCC test drive for the second seat in the Williams Renault team alongside no 1 driver Alain Menu. Plato was given the opportunity to drive against Gianni Morbidelli and Jean-Christophe Bouillon for the seat, but was initially overlooked by Frank Williams. A visit to the factory and after a meeting with Williams, he was given the seat to run in the Laguna alongside Menu for the 1997 season. Although Menu did take the 1997 Championship Plato finished third overall, won two races and qualified in pole in his first three races as a rookie. Later to drive for Vauxhall in 2000/1 he secured his first BTCC Championship and went on to win hie second with the RML Chevrolet team in 2010. Throughout his BTCC career he has won two championships, come second twelve times has had 97 race victories and stood on the podium 233 times. Surely it will take a very long time before anyone will, if ever beat these statistics. So far there has been no indication from him what he will be doing in the future, although TV presenting would seem to be a likely future career.