2L Cup Champions

The highly competitive 2L Cup series, for early two-litre SWB Porsches runs to a handicap system that penalises professional or ‘Elite’ drivers with longer pitstop times.  The races are 90 minutes with mandatory pit stop and most teams consist of two drivers.  This year two Elite drivers, Kyle Tilley and Olly Bryant went home after the last race in Estoril with the most points. 

We spoke to Olly Bryant, who has already won the series twice, in 2018 and 2022 with Andrew Smith, and asked how hard it was to win with an Elite-Elite team.  “The driver penalties work pretty well in the 2-Litre Cup.  There’s also Gentleman-Elite class, if you have one Gentlemen and one Elite, and then the Gentlemen class, which is either two Gents or a single Gent doing the whole race. 

You often have a situation where we overcome the 40-second penalty we normally get within the last few minutes of the race and catch back up with the Gents that have served less time, so it does work well. 

We had a third place finished first time out, and were beaten by a Gent-Elite car, two Gent-Elite cars actually, and then at Spa, we had a podium, finishing third behind  two Gent-Elite cars again.  It certainly means you have to work hard to get an overall victory. 

At Dijon, we managed to pull that off, and again at Paul Ricard.  That was down to us having an excellent race with everything going to plan.  Kyle had a great first stint in Dijon and kept the other quick gent-elite and elites in close contention, so he was able to hand over to me in a good position.  We had mixed conditions, which are my favourite, and I managed to pull out a gap in the second stint and get us in the lead quite early on in the stint for a change.  So that was good.  Paul Ricard looked like we were settling for second overall, and then the leader, who was a gent that I was pressuring on the last lap, made a mistake, and we got through.  So, yeah, it certainly evens it up.  And, you know, it makes it very much a challenge for the elite drivers, but you can still get close to the podium or on the podium.”

How much difference does the car prep make?  “Obviously, with any one-make series, your advantage is purely based on the performance you can drag out of the car through the setup, the engineering, and the reliability.  The series consists of five rounds, six for next year, and it’s very, very important to make sure you finish every race, which is what we did this year.  We had a 100% reliability record and, as you can’t drop any scores in this series at the moment, you cannot have any bad results.  So, we went into the penultimate round, I think only four or five points ahead of our nearest rival, so it was close run down to the wire.”