Generation Bentley Racing had a difficult opening round at the British GT Championship at Oulton Park, as drivers Steve Tandy and James Appleby got to grips with their Bentley Continental.
Due to the limited amount of testing the car in preseason, Generation Bentley decided to spend free practice fine tuning their set up and finding a strong benchmark for race set ups.
However, during qualifying it was clear that more testing was needed on the car – Tandy went as high as 12th and Appleby scored 18th, an average position considering how big the field is in this year’s British GT.
“I was a little disappointed with my qualifying times to be honest,” said Appleby. “Steve had a good qualifying session, although I struggled a little more. Although the car is new we knew the car could be better and could go quicker so based on our feedback the team made a raft of changes to the car on Sunday ready for the Monday.”
With Tandy starting 12th in race one, the opportunity was there for him to make up places on the start – which he did – but an unscheduled pit stop after making contact with a GT4 car saw the Generation Bentley fall down the field to as low as 26th before Appleby recovered to 18th.
Heading off into race two, and a conveniently timed safety car saw the Bentley hit the top ten where it held position for a good number of laps before Tandy made a move on the Nissan of Paul White to take ninth place and put a silver lining on the grey cloud of the teams weekend.
“While the racing was challenging in itself with the limited over taking opportunities at Oulton Park, the race was really good and the car was consistently on the pace”, stated Appleby. “We are glad we scored points in the second race, but a real shame we didn’t come away with points from both. We now have a busy few days getting ready for testing this week at Rockingham and focusing on prep ready for round two and taking what we have learnt at Oulton Park forwards.”
