Interview with Brian Gush, Bentley Director of Motorsport

When the Bentley Team M-Sport family made it to SIC for the Sepang 12 Hours series, DC sat down with the Director of Motorsport for a long chat.

How do people view racing Bentleys?

In terms of motorsports, people still see Bentley as a premium brand, and we have a history of motorsports in the past and recently we started reviving that, so now we are seen as more of a performance car as well as a luxury car. Luxury, we have been pretty good at and now we are bringing the performance side back in. Certainly, we want to be seen as performance cars as well as a luxury car.

You are currently the Director of Motorsport, what are the three things someone like you need to do the job?

Certainly, you have to have a great team firstly, that’s the most important, a great team of experienced guys who are passionate about it and knowledgeable and can do the job. That’s the most critical part of it. Then you got to have a great product, a car that is well developed, reliable, fast and lastly, really good drivers who can use it

What is the best achievement to date for Bentley motorsport?

We are only in our second year back. So we did three eras of Bentley motorsport. You had the 1920s where the great legends with five Le Mans win, then I was privileged to be in charge of the second era which was the Le Mans win in 2003, so that was a great achievement. And now in the third era, it’s only our second season since we have been back and we came in second in the driver’s championship and the team championship last year, and this year we won the Sprint Series championship and GT Asia, and so those were two great Championship wins.

Any regrets to date where motorsport is concerned for Bentley?

Well, we would like to win more; we would like to win everything that we enter. We want to win. Spa 24 is the big one, yeah?

Apart from that, no other regrets? Because there was a big commotion after you guys won in 2003, and then there was that decision to get out of it.

We could have continued in 2004 and won it again in 2004 but at the time we were building the business. We had just launched the Continental GT and we were trying to build the business up, we got first and second you can only do the same and not better.

Yes, but if you had continued, wouldn’t the learning from all those years…

Oh yeah, that would have been great but at the time we had not launched the Continental, so we weren’t actually making money for the company and we had to start building the business to get the volume up to start making money again.

Describe a perfect race weekend.

Winning.

Biggest worry on a race weekend?

Keeping out of trouble, to keep the guys out of contact with other cars on the track and out of trouble so that you can get the maximum performance out of the car.

No concerns on the technical or mechanical aspect of the car?

No, we are good in that aspect.

What would be the one thing you would do to improve on the current cars apart from the drivers?

At the moment, we are happy with the car, it’s in its second season and we have not seen or found anything that we really want to change on it. It’s still very competitive, still winning races. We won the race in every series we entered in the season so we feel the car is very competitive. At the moment, there is nothing I want to change on it. Catch the rest of the interview in the March issue of CAR Malaysia.