The Bentley Continental GT3 is now a winning package in its 2nd generation version, taking the overall Victory at Bathurst earlier this year.
But few are aware that even before the first-generation Continental GT3 was developed there was another programme working to bring the brand back to front-line racing for the first time since its Le Mans victory in 2003.
Whilst behind closed doors at Bentley’s Crewe base Brian Gush was attempting to put together an LMP1 programme for the brand, with little appetite being shown by the Company, down in Cambridgeshire a random piece of business for a specialist motorsport supplier would light the fire that led to Bentley’s GT3 future.
GT3 had been in play since 2006 but in the summer of 2011, a Bentley Continental road car owner decided that he wanted to take his car racing, not at anything close to GT3 levels, simply as a club racer in the Bentley Owners Club races.
He did want though to stay safe on track, and took the decision to have the car fitted with a custom roll cage. His choice of supplier would be the key element in this story – He took it to Rollcentre!
Rollcentre boss Martin Short takes up the tale:
“The car arrived stripped down, and minus wheels and was basically slammed to the floor, at about the height of GT race car. It struck me how much smaller the car actually was compared to the behemoth that we see on the roads, and that it was very very aerodynamically sympathetic. It looked slippery. I had been a big fan of the BMW Alpina GT3, a privateer entry, that I watched win at Silverstone. It was also a big car…..which meant bog floor pan, which meant big aero.
(The Alpina B6 GT3 was a GT3 homologated version of Alpina’s take on the BMW 650i, released in 2009, and pre-dating the factory-developed M6GT3 by 6 years!)
“We’d been around the houses with homologation before (with the Mosler amongst other heroic Rollcentre projects) so I know we had to talk to Bentley if we were going to get anything off the ground. “I had a chat with a few of the Owners Clubs guys at Silverstone and whilst they knew a name or two at Bentley they had no idea how to contact them.
“Brian Gush’s name was clearly the one to aim for so I literally guessed his email address and pressed ‘Send’ with the idea that the Continental could be a great GT3 car and ignite a whole sporting range of the model.
“He responded with a nice note, congratulating me on my guessing his email address, asking for more details and suggesting a meeting.”
That meeting, and others, followed and to condense the story Bentley agreed to ‘loan’ a road car for the purpose of evaluation (seen below en rate from Bentley to Rollcentre) and the early stages of the project proceeded very rapidly.
Short was also by then in contact with a variety of potential specialist contributors to the project to assist with design, 3d modelling etc.
A potential link with Lola and Sergio Rinland fell to cost considerations (there was no money coming from Bentley for the project), instead, an arrangement was made with Simon Dowson from Delta Motorsport with additional support from TotalSim on aeromodelling. They elected to get involved, for no charge, to get the project kick-started.
“Simon had a lot of 3d modelling capacity and agreed to do some conceptual work in the early stages to get us to and through the stage of Bentley approval. “That work went alongside our stripping the car, the road car came in at around 2.5 tonnes but there was a lot of weight that was pretty easy to lose.
“The seats and the doors for starters were massively heavy. It was pretty clear that we could get the car down to a sensible weight for GT3.
The project team also did some conceptual design work on a GT2 version of the Continental GT, the 3d renders of that car are presented below.
Nick Couche and Nick Palmer were responsible for the 3d renders.
“We started some basic design engineering work, working out the optimum position for the engine and drivetrain (the road car was, of course, four-wheel drive – not permitted for GT3) and other key stuff, and, again having been here before, I then contacted the FIA for information on the homologation process.”
That’s where things started to go wrong, and Rollcentre’s timing was very unlucky. Those behind the GT3 homologation process had recently emerged from a thorny issue surrounding two separate homologated projects for the then-new Chevrolet Camaro which had led to a new regulation stating clearly that any homologated vehicle could only have one homologation for GT3 and that this had to be formally approved by the manufacturer.
There seemed too to be a couple of other issues in play, some undue concerns over the potential vehicle weight, an area where the intervention of Stephane Ratel on Rollcentre’s behalf seems to have been a very positive force.
The weight issue would have been something of a red herring in any case – the heaviest GT3 at the time was the gullwing doored Mercedes AMG SLS GT3 weighing in at 1380 kgs, Rollcentre’s working projection was a 1350kg Bentley.
“I was gobsmacked that the FIA didn’t seem to understand that the car would be capable of being turned in a GT3 race car. They seemed to think it was going to weigh a couple of tones….. that really didn’t help. I was made to look foolish.”
There seems too to have been a move at the time from the FIA, likely in the wake of the Camaro debacle, to ‘ask questions’ of manufacturers on whether they should consider in-house GT3 programmes rather than entrust their Intellectual Property to external ‘tuners’, this at a time when manufacturers were realising that motorsport in the GT3 era could be a profit-generating enterprise, rather than the cost-centre that the sport had been for decades.
Either way, after a thorough and comprehensive presentation, complete with renders (the pictures in this article are from that presentation), comparative data to the then GT3 front-runners and aero analysis, things cooled off rather dramatically with what had been, until that point, a cordial two-way process, very rapidly taking on a very different feel.
From a position in late 2011 where the Rollcentre project was being discussed (in very positive terms) with the FIA, SRO, and within VAG motorsport departments there were just a few months, during which time Bentley pulled the plug rather abruptly before the company revealed their own GT3 programme in the Spring of 2012, with significant input from specialist consultants who had been approached by Rollcentre as part of their own project.
Martin Short:
“Whilst Gush was pushing the board on an LMP project, it became quickly clear that the board (VAG owned) had recognised that the route I had alerted them to was going to be a great direction for the company. There was no room in the deal for a minnow like us, and we were literally dumped without any ceremony, thanks, or offer of any form or recompense.
“When I protested, at the time effort and funding that my business and my allies had put into this, I was presented with a bill from them which included ‘rebuilding the loan Continental” (which had been stripped by us to the shell for the investigation) and a bunch of other nefarious drummed up costs, and I left that battlefield well and truly spanked. So that was my first, and last dealing with a ‘Board’. It was never like this working with Pater Wheeler of TVR, and Lee Noble of Noble Cars. It was a handshake…..”
That left Rollcentre high and dry, with a programme that would not be progressed, but with customers already in hand for what they had hoped would be a significant relationship with a mainstream manufacturer.
Unsurprisingly Martin Short emerged unimpressed from the ‘adventure’, the Bentley ‘mule’ was returned, there was a sharp exchange of emails on the subject of costs incurred, agreements signed and confidentiality and there the story ends, another ‘what might have been’ in motorsport.
Final words to Martin Short:
“After all was said and done, the project turned into something quite huge. I’m not sure that I would have enjoyed it, so I probably dodged a bullet. But when I look at that car, it’s difficult not to have an attachment to it.”
All pics courtesy of Martin Short and copyright Rollcentre Racing, Delta Motorsport and TotalSim
