Skip to main content

Bentley Returns to Pirelli World Challenge for 2016

  • Bentley confirms 2016 Pirelli World Challenge championship campaign with Absolute Racing
  • Two cars confirmed with third entry planned
  • Andrew Palmer and Adderly Fong will each race a Continental GT3

21 December 2015, Crewe – At least two Bentley Continental GT3s will enter the 2016 Pirelli World Challenge as Bentley Team Absolute announces a programme including entries from young American rising star Andrew Palmer and one of Asia’s top sportscar drivers, Adderly Fong.

The Pirelli World Challenge is a 20-round GT championship comprising 50-minute-long, single-driver races on eleven of America’s most historic and iconic race tracks, including Laguna Seca and Road America.  The Continental GT3 has taken race wins in the championship this year and Bentley Team Absolute is looking to continue the race car’s success in the States.

The campaign will run alongside the team’s GT Asia Series programme, in which it aims to retain its teams’ championship-winning title while claiming the drivers’ championship title.

“We’ve won major international championships in Europe and Asia this year and it is certainly the plan to take a title in America,” comments Bentley’s Director of Motorsport, Brian Gush. “Bentley Team Absolute has proven they have what it takes, so we are excited to take our relationship into another continent to take on another challenge.”

“We are pleased to have Adderly back for a second season and look forward to welcoming Andrew into the Bentley fold,” continues Gush. “We have been very impressed with Andrew, not only did he become the youngest ever overall race winner in Pirelli World Challenge in 2014 but he has shown great maturity and talent in 2015 and we look forward to working with him to develop his career further.”

Bentley Team Absolute’s Team Director, Ingo Matter, comments:

“We’re delighted to confirm this additional programme. It’s a major new market for our team and we couldn’t be happier to be doing it with Bentley. Our experience in Asia with the Bentley Continental GT3s will give us a major boost. We’re sure that the combination of Adderly’s experience with the car and Andrew’s experience in the Pirelli World Challenge will also add further layers of confidence to the programme.”

Despite being new to Bentley, 21-year old Palmer has completed a season in Pirelli World Challenge and impressed in his debut Blancpain Endurance Series season racing against the Bentley Motorsport factory team.

25-year old Fong is no stranger to the Continental GT3, as he and his Bentley Team Absolute team-mates took the racecar’s first teams’championship-win in GT Asia Series earlier this year.

While the two-car programme is confirmed, the team is in talks with several drivers regarding a third entry.

The Pirelli World Challenge kicks off at the Circuit of the Americas on 3 March 2016.

The post Bentley Returns to Pirelli World Challenge for 2016 appeared first on VWVortex.



from VWVortex http://ift.tt/1mgoMMa
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