INSIGHT: Bentley hangs tough in Mid-Ohio

“We can complain because rose bushes have thorns,” Abraham Lincoln once said, “or, we can rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.”

In the immediate aftermath of Dyson Racing’s third Pirelli World Challenge outing with its Bentley Continental GT3, driver Butch Leitzinger wasn’t quite sure what kind of foliage was winning out.

“In the long run, I guess you could say that this weekend was a good experience,” he said. “Of course, it’s a bit difficult to think about the long run when I’m still standing here in the garage.”

If you judge the weekend purely by the numbers, you can see where the sportscar veteran is coming from: a 12th and an eighth from the weekend’s two races don’t look like the sort of results that will inspire the Dyson team to go out and get matching tattoos.

But results alone don’t tell you about the Jekyll and Hyde weather that swept across the Buckeye State during the weekend, or the setup experiments that the team carried out…some successful, some less so. And they don’t tell you how much the team learned – perhaps the most important factor of all. Amassing information about the Bentley is Dyson’s overriding objective this year, with the aim of turning that knowledge into results in 2015.

The bizarre conditions that the team faced during its previous outing on the Toronto street circuit stood it in good stead as it headed to the undulating swoops of Mid-Ohio SportsCar Course, a conventional road course that was expected to be a more natural fit for the Bentley’s strengths.

“Toronto, as tough as it was, gave us a really good understanding of the car,” said Leitzinger. “So we’re in a better position now. At [the car’s debut at] Road America it was a bit like … ‘this set-up seems to be OK, so let’s not change too much’. Now, we’re able to experiment a little bit and figure out what does what.”

Leitzinger qualified a solid eighth in the 50-car field, although he felt he could have been even higher on the grid had he not encountered traffic. Nevertheless, the fourth row was a more than high enough starting position to give the Bentley a fighting chance at a strong result – providing the weather held up. And despite the darkening clouds that continued to build over the circuit as race time approached, Leitzinger remained hopeful.

“If it stays dry, I actually think this weekend can be quite good,” he said. “The forte of this car is its performance over the entire stint. It just takes us a little bit to get going, so the first four or so laps are tough. But if it rains, it will kind of follow the same pattern as the last few weekends: it will be new to us. Toronto started out a little damp, but it wasn’t really wet. We’d rather be introduced to rain in a practice session or something like that. But it’s good for the long-term if we get a wet race in now, so that we’re prepared for next year.”

The rain did indeed arrive a few laps after the start, and the Dyson crew brought the Bentley in for wet tires. Unfortunately for them, the race was called off after just 11 laps, and Leitzinger was leapfrogged by the drivers who stayed out on slick tires behind the safety car.

“The rain today was a bit of a curveball,” admitted technical director Peter Weston. “I have worked on this car in the rain in British GT, so I had an idea of what would work and what wouldn’t. But we’re used to trying to be on the right tire for the conditions so we changed to wet tires, and the race didn’t go green again.

“Some people had stayed out on slicks behind the safety car. You pit and lose time, but you think that everyone is going to have to do the same thing and it will all balance out. Instead, they flagged the race, so it was very unfortunate.”The second race was even more eventful. An attempt to improve the car’s launch system for the standing start backfired when Leitzinger stalled on the grid, and by the time he got the Continental moving, he’d lost a lot of positions. (“I was in the teens somewhere,” he said.)

But the dry conditions and a long stint under green flags played to the Bentley’s strengths: the longer it is allowed to run, the faster it becomes. All the same, on a track where overtaking is so difficult, Leitzinger admitted that charging back to his starting position of eighth required him to be a little adventurous.

“I was really having to be creative,” he chuckled. “There were some places where I don’t think I’ve ever actually passed before. [Team owner] Rob [Dyson] told me that he was going to be up at the Keyhole corner, and that was where I ended up making a couple of passes. And while I was in the middle of them I was cognizant of him watching. I was just thinking, ‘please don’t let this all go wrong’.”

Leitzinger’s charge was assisted by the Bentley’s strength under braking. “The brakes on the Continental are fantastic,” he said. “If you catch somebody, you can just go right underneath them”. But his progress came at some cost to the life of his tires; another area that the team will look at ahead of the next race at Sonoma. It’s all part of the ongoing mission to chisel the Bentley into a PWC force in 2015.

“Everything we’re doing is really about tuning the car to this series,” said Weston. “The car has obviously done a lot of miles in the Blancpain Series, and three-hour races, and 24 hour races in the case of Spa last weekend. So this is a different arena for it, and we’ve just got to tune it accordingly. The World Challenge is a terrific series to be in; the interest in it and the level of competition is stunning. So it’s going to be good to get the car running and have a good go next year.