Skip to main content

Bentley Continental GT3 and Birkin Blower Meet at Silverstone

  • Racers past and present come together to mark extraordinary year of motorsport
  • 2015 saw Continental GT3 win two major international GT championship titles
  • This year marks the 85th anniversary of the famous 1930 Le Mans win
  • Cars met at the British Racing Drivers’ Club – founded by Bentley Boy, Dudley Benjafield

(Crewe, 3 December 2015) With the chequered flag set to fall on the 2015 motorsport season, Bentley is celebrating a remarkable run of results by bringing together two generations of racer – the Continental GT3 and legendary 4.5 Litre ‘Blower’.

The current GT3 and its illustrious forebear from 1929 met at Silverstone in front of the British Racing Drivers’ Club (BRDC), the motorsport organisation founded in 1928 by Bentley Boy and Le Mans winner, Dudley Benjafield.

They may be separated by more than eight decades but the two racing cars share Bentley’s indefatigable passion for innovation, competition and, above all, speed.

Bentley Continental GT3 in 2015 – A Season to Remember

In just its second year of competition in GT racing, the Bentley motorsports programme has gone from strength to strength in 2015.

With teams competing on four continents, the Continental GT3 scored multiple pole positions, race wins, podiums and, at the end of the season,  won the highly-competitive Blancpain Sprint Series and took the overall team title in the GT Asia Series.

Other highlights from the season include a best-ever finish at the 24 Hours of Spa, a four-car assault on the Nürburgring 24 Hours and successful completion of the grueling Bathurst 12 Hours.

With a driver line-up featuring Le Mans winner, Guy Smith, former BRDC Young Driver of the Year, Steven Kane, and 2015 Blancpain Sprint Series champion, Vincent Abril, next year’s racing promises to be even more fruitful.

Bentley’s Director of Motorsport, Brian Gush, said: “As the team prepares for another exciting racing season in 2016, it’s rewarding to look back on 2015 and to see how far we’ve come. We’re racing on four continents in the world’s largest and most competitive GT races and series. From Bathurst to Silverstone and Macau to Monterey, we’re competing with the best that GT racing has to offer.”

The Birkin ‘Blower’

One of just five ever made for racing, the Blower was used by the original Bentley racing team – the Bentley Boys – of the late 1920s, and is still performing over eight decades later.

This year marks the 85th anniversary of the Woolf Barnato and Glen Kidston Le Mans victory in 1930. While the supercharged Blower wasn’t the winning car that day, with Tim Birkin at the wheel its heroic performance embodies the true spirit of the vintage racing era.

In the 1930 race, Birkin and his Blower diced for the lead with Mercedes ace, Rudi Carracciola, passing him flat out down the Hunaudières straight with his nearside wheels on the grass. Birkin successfully pushed the Mercedes to breaking point, but also had to retire with six hours to go, and the race was eventually won by Barnato and Kidston in their Speed Six.

Featuring its original Vanden Plas Open Sports four-seat body, the Blower was described by Autocar magazine in September 1930 as having ‘the appeal of immense power, linked with great docility’.

Bentley and the British Racing Drivers’ Club

Joseph Dudley Benjafield had a lifelong passion for motorsports. He began racing after purchasing a Bentley 3 Litre in 1924. He had talent, and was quickly offered a drive in Bentley’s company racer. He competed in the 24 Hours of Le Mans seven times, and won the event in 1927 with co-driver and fellow Bentley Boy, Sammy Davis.

Benjafield founded the BRDC in 1928. It began primarily as a socialising club for him and his fellow drivers, but by the time of its inauguration the 25 original members had devised a set of objectives for the club, including ‘to extend hospitality to racing drivers from overseas’.

Today the BRDC is, arguably, the most exclusive club in motor racing. With a membership that numbers only 800, it is home to the most successful racing drivers from Great Britain and the Commonwealth. Those who have met the exacting entry criteria have achieved at the highest levels of the sport, or made a significant contribution to enable others to do so.

The post Bentley Continental GT3 and Birkin Blower Meet at Silverstone appeared first on VWVortex.



from VWVortex http://ift.tt/1OILfu4
via IFTTT
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Project SportWagen: Going Stage 2 with APR

    When we last left you, the humble little SportWagen was fresh from the development process with our friends at AWE Tuning, sporting a new downpipe, exhaust and intake, allowing things to breathe a bit easier.  The car sounded great, but there was no getting around the fact that our wagon was still quite, well, slow.   While we realize that nothing we do to the Golf SportWagen at this point will make it a race car, we still felt compelled to do something .  To put it bluntly, we had a fever, and the only cure was more power. Flash forward a few hours, and we found ourselves at Waterfest, staring down APR’s palatial spread and the numerous tuned vehicles surrounding it.  Earlier in the year, APR had hinted to us that their 1.8 TSI files would be quite impressive, and based on what they were able to do with the 2.0 TSI found in the new GTI and our time in their Golf R, we knew it’d be worth the wait.  So with this in mind, we lined our G...
Post a Comment
Read more

Volkswagen Group Records Best Ever First-Half-of-Year Sales

With 5.5 million vehicles in customer hands after the first six months of 2018, the Volkswagen Group is seeing the best performance of its history. Group deliveries increased significantly in all core regions,” said Fred Kappler, head of sales for the Group. “Our core brands recorded strong growth in the first half year.” For the year-to-date, all of Volkswagen’s brands had sales bumps. MAN, SEAT, and Skoda led the sales charge with performances 24%, 17% and 11% better than the previous year. The big sellers, too, had strong sales periods, with Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, Audi, and Volkswagen sales rising 3.5%, 4.5% and 6.3% respectively. That last figure is particularly good new for the board, since Volkswagen alone sold more than 3 million vehicles in the first half of 2018. As Kappler stated, the numbers are equally good when you break sales down by region. Brazil and Russia were the most improved markets (22% and 20%, respectively), while strong sales in Europe and China (u...
2 comments
Read more

Project Golf SportWagen- Intro

I’ve never really been one for SUVs and crossovers.  The current offerings aren’t the body-on-frame, go-anywhere specialty tools I remember from my youth, and what they lack in capability, they also lack in on-road performance. The current crop isn’t terribly good at handling or being efficient, which in my opinion are major components of our ideal driving experience.  So when it comes to space or utility, I usually look for something of the wagon variety- and it seems that I’m not alone. We hit quite a few shows around the east coast each summer, and we see modified Jetta SportWagens at nearly every event. Even amongst common consumers, these cars are highly sought-after. They don’t depreciate much, making even early Mk 5 2.5 versions expensive in comparison to other Jettas or Golfs of the same vintage. This year, Volkswagen launched their latest SportWagen, which is now billed as a Golf.  In many ways, this latest SportWagen is the best yet and it has certai...
Post a Comment
Read more