Although the Pikes Peak International Hillclimb and race events where GT3 finds itself in a regular race season calendar are both forms of motorsport, they have almost nothing in common. As such, taking a GT3 race car designed to compete in circuit racing events on permanent tracks worldwide and adapt it for a sprint hill climb event up a very high mountain in Colorado, USA, is no easy feat. That is the challenge that Bentley Racing took on for its attempt at breaking the road car based vehicle record up the 12.42-mile trek up Pikes Peak Highway with 156 turns that begins at 9,390 feet and finishes at the 14,115-foot summit.
The primary challenge of Pikes Peak for all competitors running internal combustion power is developing and tuning the engine to cope with the altitude, both in producing power at the base as well as the summit while also keeping temperatures under control. The engine in Bentley’s Pikes Peak challenger is a development of the race-proven GT3 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8. Available power is around 550 bhp (BoP dependent) in GT3 trim with a boost curve enforced by the sanctioning body to keep the car competitive with its competition on the track.  For the Pikes Peak challenge, there are no such limits in engine performance or power delivery, and for the hill climb, Bentley set its sights on extracting the most it could from the base GT3 powerplant. ‘We wanted to target about 800 to 850 horsepower at altitude,’ explains David Argent,...