Farewell to the hero of Bentley's second motorsport coming

One of the unsung heroes of British motor racing will hang up his headphones for good on Sunday evening. Brian Gush is standing down as Bentley's motorsport boss after this weekend's Spa 24 Hours with little in the way of fanfare. Or at least that fanfare will be absent if Bentley doesn't win the blue-riband round of the Blancpain GT Series.

Victory or no, the South African is going to head off into retirement with few knowing just how important he has been in the racing history of the famous and prestigious brand.

Put simply, without Gush, mention of Bentley and motorsport today would still mean a long lost era the better part of 100 years ago when privileged young men were winning the Le Mans 24 Hours at the same time as having a jolly good time.

We'd still be talking just about Birkin and Barnato as emblems of Bentley's motorsport history, and not Kristensen and Kane as well.

Without Gush there would be no second chapter to the Bentley story, or maybe that should be second and third chapters.

He was the architect of Bentley's LM-GTP project in the early noughties and its 2003 victory at Le Mans, just as he is the man responsible for its exploits in the GT3 arena today.

Gush had the imagination, determination, connections and, after joining the company as head of chassis and powertrain in 1999, the political clout to pick up a design that wasn't conceived as a Bentley at all.

The project that begat the EXP Speed 8, the car that took the factory back to Le Mans after an absence of 70 years in 2001, had started life as something altogether different.

A Volkswagen in fact. The car was designed by Racing Technology Norfolk for a W12 powerplant championed by group chairman Ferdinand Piech, the father of the Porsche 917 30 years before.

A press release was written announcing the end of the Bentley project. Gush prevented it being sent out. Time was bought

What was dubbed "an airship engine" by some of those involved turned out to be totally unsuitable for racing and the project never got much beyond some kind of roll-out test with the thing in the back of an open-top Lola prototype.

Gush knew all about the project - he'd worked with VW motorsport boss Andre van der Watt back home in South Africa - and picked it up and ran with it.

Key to getting a Bentley LM-GTP car on track was finding an engine. That bridge was crossed when he struck a deal in the pitlane at Le Mans in 2000 with another branch of the VW family.

Gush persuaded Audi boss Franz-Josef Paefgen to lease him a supply of the same 3.6-litre twin-turbo V8 powerplant that would notch up its first triumph in the 24 Hours that weekend (pictured above). Within a few months, a test hack was up and running with a Cosworth DFV-based engine supplied by Nicholson-McLaren - the Audi engine wasn't yet available.

Eight months after that one of the EXP Speed 8s claimed a podium at Le Mans with Andy Wallace, Eric van de Poele and Butch Leitzinger driving.

It would be easy to say, 'and the rest is history'.

But the short history of the LM-GTP programme isn't as straightforward as it might appear. The project very nearly foundered over the winter of 2001-02. The cost-cutting measures that resulted in Bentley's assault being scaled back to one car for 2002 very nearly did for the marque's Le Mans attack. And would you believe that the third-place car from 2001 was sold to release a bit of cash?

A press release was written announcing the end of the project. Gush prevented it being sent out. Time was bought and within a couple of months the top management had changed at Bentley.

Paefgen took over the reins and the project was saved. Not only was it reignited, but it was reinvigorated too. That would probably not have been possible without Gush's intervention.

A decision was made to produce an all-new car for 2003 and go all-out for victory. The Bentleys swapped to Michelin tyres after two years in which the marque had tipped its hat to history by running Dunlops and the Joest Racing team was incorporated into the Bentley set-up. The dream Le Mans result followed, Tom Kristensen, Rinaldo Capello and Guy Smith leading home a one-two.

Job done, Bentley opted to focus its resources elsewhere, but Gush was adamant that one day the marque would be back in racing. Somewhere, somehow.

Le Mans, of course, was always his preference for a firm with such heritage at the place and there was very nearly a tie-up with Lola at the end of the last decade. The economic downturn did for that one.

Gush regards the Spa 24 Hours as unfinished business

The arrival of high-tech LMP1 hybrids put the pinnacle beyond Bentley's financial reach, and besides, the LMP1 class already had two brands from the VW group in Audi and Porsche. But Gush saw another way forward.

The Continental luxury sports coupe appeared to be an unlikely base for a racing car, but the GT3 rulebook - in which there isn't so much in the way of concrete regulations - made it possible. Gush had kept his promise.

The Continental GT3 hasn't done badly through two generations of car developed by M-Sport since 2013. It's won big races in the Blancpain GT Series and notched up a fair smattering of titles on multiple continents.

But what it hasn't done is triumphed in the 'big one' at Spa. That explains why Gush postponed retirement to oversee a four-car factory assault on this weekend's race. He regards it as unfinished business, particularly after the works M-Sport team's near-miss in 2016.

A victory in the 'other' 24-hour race worth winning in Europe would be a fitting way for Gush to sign off on his Bentley career. It would help remind the world just how important he has been in the history of a great racing marque as it celebrates its 100th anniversary this month.