INSIGHT: Bentley scores first victory on American soil… and prepares for 2015

(ABOVE, left to right: Chris Dyson, Bentley Motors president and CEO Christophe Georges, Rob Dyson, Guy Smith, Butch Leitzinger, after a 1-3 finish in Pirelli World Challenge's penultimate round.)

If all goes according to plan, the lessons get smaller.

In the beginning of a new race program, the lessons are large. As time goes on, they shrink. Each gain is usually smaller than the last. In its first half-season of Pirelli World Challenge competition, it would seem Dyson Racing Team Bentley has dispensed with the large lessons and only needs to hone; in the Bentley Continental GT3’s ninth race, Guy Smith put the car on pole, set the fastest lap and took the win at Miller Motorsports Park. It was not only a great way to celebrate his 40th birthday, but it was also the first Bentley victory on American soil in the marque’s history.

While victory this early in the program is certainly cause for celebration, it hardly tells the whole story. The win was much harder than it needed to be, and like all motorsport victories, required Fate’s help, too. The World Challenge’s standing starts have troubled Smith and Butch Leitzinger, who finished third in Round 15 at Miller for his second podium, after the same result in Sonoma. And so it was on Friday in Utah. Smith went from pole to sixth at the start while Leitzinger slid from third to eighth.

Annoying at the time, that in fact gave the pair a stage on which to showcase their own talents and the Continental GT3’s potential, as both sliced through the field. At the end of lap five, Smith was third behind Ryan Dalziel’s Porsche and Robert Thorne’s McLaren. A clutch problem for Dalziel and an error in negotiating traffic for Thorne put Smith on top.

“We didn’t come in with dreams of dominating and jumping to the top of the podium every race from the first race,” says Leitzinger. “The way we’ve been able to progress and be competitive – and increasingly competitive – every weekend has laid a great foundation for us next year. And that’s what 2014 was really about: getting an understanding of the car, a foothold, so we had something to launch next year and really try to make a challenge for the championship.”

Leitzinger, after making the Continental GT3’s debut at Road America with a pair of strong finishes, campaigned a single car for six races. The streets of Toronto were a painful lesson with a crash followed by a ninth place finish, not bad for a car that had never seen a street circuit. “It took a little bit to figure our how to make the car not jump from manhole cover to manhole cover!” Leitzinger notes.

The twisty Mid-Ohio circuit presented another challenge for the team. Both tracks were rather different from the European circuits such as Silverstone and Paul Ricard where Smith, along with Steven Kane and Andy Meyrick, has won races in the Blancpain Endurance Series. That doesn’t even take into account the very different nature of the sprint races in Pirelli World Challenge.

For the final two doubleheader weekends of the World Challenge season, Dyson Racing Team Bentley entered a second car and brought in Smith, who has a long history with Dyson, just as Leitzinger does, to drive. Having a second car certainly elevated the program, and Leitzinger scored a third and a fifth at Sonoma Raceway, while Smith finished ninth and then 16th after starting the second race from pole but experiencing a temporary mechanical glitch.

“Having a second car online was a huge help to everyone, me included, just because I was able to see where I was losing time to Guy,” notes Leitzinger. “Also, we’re able to split our setups at the beginning of the weekend and see whose was working better where and kind of come to a convergence for qualifying. When you have two cars, it’s not even double the data you’re getting, it’s more than that. With one car, you’re kind of afraid to go too far off your base setup, because you don’t want to get lost. When you have two, you can be more adventurous.”

Smith, who has played a key role in developing the Continental GT3 from the get-go, was quite familiar with car before he stepped into Dyson’s. He, Leitzinger and the team bring a wealth of experience with many of the tracks that World Challenge races on. The team itself has 19 racing championships in a variety of series. Bringing all that experience together made the jump into the strange waters of World Challenge much more successful.

“I think what I bring is the experience of the car,” says Smith. “I think the team is very well acclimatized to the car. I think I bring… not a benchmark, that’s not the right word… but I’m a known quantity and I know the car well. They know that, pace-wise, that’s where the car is. And I think it’s been a good gauge for Butch, because Butch hasn’t done much GT racing and until Sonoma, he’s only been driving the Bentley on his own. So he didn’t know if he was driving good, bad or indifferent. The truth is he’s been doing a fantastic job. Me and him are on a par; he’s driving brilliantly.”

Adapting a car designed for endurance racing, as the new GT3-based world order in World Challenge requires, is something many teams are facing. But most of them had a half-season advantage over Dyson Racing Team Bentley, and some of them, such as the Audi R8s, had even more as the teams had been running them in the

series for a year in near-GT3 form. The learning curve in getting the car competitive in 50-minute sprint races – which often turn into a pair of 20-minute races thanks to cautions – has been steep.

“It’s about combining the institutional knowledge we have of the tracks and linking it to the new project with Bentley,” explains Peter Weston, the team’s technical director. “Just learning how much the tires will give back to us. We’ve got the four big tires on the car, and that’s a unique package in the pit lane. Our LMP prototype had the big front tires on it, so we brought some of that experience to how much capacity there is in a tire of that size.

“Getting the car to respond to [the short stints] has been one of our challenges here that is not such a priority in Blancpain. They go for the long distance endurance. You can keep a good long burn, whereas here, we’ve got to be a little more explosive. Engineering the car to do that without limiting the downsides  of doing that –keeping the tires on the car and yet having them come in quickly. The challenge of the short races is to get the car punchy.”

And that includes the problematic starts. There hasn’t been much time in the season to do any testing, and so fixing the launches is a prior

ity over the winter as it prepares for a full assault on the championship next year. This half season was all about getting the basics down.

“The program came together really quickly and we knew we had some very good bases from which to start,” says Chris Dyson, vice president and sporting director of the team, “but with the style of racing being so different with the sprint format, we wanted to manage expectations both within and without the organization. Our goal going in was to get on the podium regularly and be threatening for race wins. But, deep down, we wanted a race win and I think Friday everything fell into place for that to happen. I would say that met our expectations. Exceeding our expectations would be multiple race wins! But by and large our goals were to pick up a strong point and carry forward for a more sustained championship attack.”

The team hasn’t made any decisions on drivers, although 2011 American Le Mans Series P1 champ Dyson readily admits he’s itching to get back behind the wheel again. But whoever drives, he believes the team has a solid foundation on which to build.

“The main thing with any racing car is to have a cookbook,” he says. “By that I mean really an established recipe for where you go with the setup when you see a certain problem. That was something we were learning all year. I think as you build your base of experience quickly, you then have a much clearer window of answers and solutions.”

Weston has a similar outlook. Much of the Continental GT3’s first half-season in Pirelli World Challenge has been about adapting. Next year it will be about refining.

“Converting the setups that have worked so well in Europe to the setups we’re now developing here – they’re the things we can take away,” says Weston. “We’re homing in on a setup that is going to be quite portable from race to race, which is key when you have short test sessions. And the car has a good operating window.

“If we can get a sort of base setup, it will make a very good customer car. You don’t want a car that’s got a very sharp peak of performance that you’re going to hit one race in 10. You want a car that is good everywhere without a lot of testing time required, because you don’t have it. That is one of the car’s strengths, its portability.”

While the competition in World Challenge is only going to get stronger, so, likely, is Dyson Racing Team Bentley. While it still has one big lesson to master, the season just completed has served as a strong educational foundation. The remaining instruction is details. Then, perhaps, it’s time for them to teach the competition a thing or two.