Coulthard drives Loeb's Pikes Peak record breaker

This summer it was pretty hard to miss Sebastien Loeb's record-breaking run up Pikes Peak - except, with one thing and another on my plate, I managed to! But standing beside it, looking for the doorhandle and the way in, I'm starting to think that's not such a bad thing.

The good thing is that I've got no preconceptions. I've seen Sebastien doing a few laps of the Red Bull Ring in the wet and he looked... handy. Now, courtesy of AUTOSPORT, it's my turn. The track's dried out quite nicely. Good news, but I'm still not sure what to expect.

Central seating position

It's quite a climb to get into the Peugeot 208 T16. A bit like a DTM car, the seating position is central, so you have to clamber over a fair bit of kit to get into the belts. Apart from moving the seat back a little bit - I'm a wee bit taller than Seb - everything fits.

You'd find with pretty much all drivers, the distance from shoulders to steering wheel is very similar. How things have changed from the days when I was driving in the classic, Jim Clark straight-arm style in my Formula Ford days in 1989.

As you move up the ranks and the cars become more and more powerful, you get closer and closer until the point where you're virtually chewing on the steering wheel.

With a central seating position, the 208 T16 offers good lateral vision and is instantly intuitive

Forward and semi-lateral vision is very good, which you'd expect from this sort of car. In fairness, when Seb was going up the hill, he was on his own and completely focused on corner to corner - he wasn't looking out for anybody else on the same piece of road.

Immediately, the car feels intuitive. And that goes for the pedals as well. Once in the zone and driving, everything totally comes to hand.

A car that is not instinctive has been either been produced by an arsehole designer or an idiot racing driver. That's definitely not the case here. I don't know the design team at Peugeot, but the driver in question is definitely not an idiot!

Phenomenal acceleration

Coming out of the pitlane and accelerating hard, the car feels responsive and powerful. There's no launch control because it didn't need it: Pikes Peak is a rolling start, and I think Seb said he crossed the startline already doing 100mph.

The best corner for this car is definitely Turn 2, the hairpin. I'd like to see the acceleration data from an F1 car against the 208 for the first 10 to 15 metres from the apex - I think the Peugeot would be quicker with the four-wheel drive.

There's plenty of get-up-and-go out of there, but you'd pretty quickly find the lighter F1 car coming past you.

The minor frustration in the car today is the gearing: it's quite short, which obviously works at Pikes Peak, but today it does mean I'm having to lift off the throttle at vmax.

We're hitting around 150mph, which is only about 10mph short of what we used to get from the DTM car, but it makes it hard to try and place where this 208 would sit in the scheme of things with DTM or endurance racing cars. It also makes it hard to judge the brakes...

Coulthard said acceleration was phenomenal, but that brakes were slightly weaker than in DTM

Decent stopping power

I have to lift off the throttle coming into the two big braking areas which means, mentally, your timing is out. The carbon brakes and large-contact-patch Michelin tyres do their job and get the car slowed down well.

It's unfair to compare this with a Formula 1 car - clearly nothing would compare with that sort of stopping power - but the 208 is maybe a little bit down on the DTM cars I'm used to as well.

Don't forget DTM cars have a huge venturi beneath them and a splitter that's virtually rubbing along the ground - we know that's a very effective way to generate load.

'Massive' aerodynamics

The one thing you can't fail to notice about this car is that wing from the 908. It's massive! It's like Peugeot just took the biggest piece of aero they could find, stuck a three-inch gurney on the side and put it on the car.

It certainly develops downforce at the rear, but for our test we are definitely lacking front-end grip at low speed.

I would definitely be looking for more from that side of the car. Even at a circuit like Monaco, or any street circuit, I always wanted a load of front end at turn-in.

You can always turn away if you turn in too early, but if you turn in and nothing happens, you find yourself on a one-way ticket to the barrier.

Between Turns 4 and 5, the 208 moves towards understeer, and a flap or something at the front would help to correct that.

Certainly, if you were setting it up in the classic style, where you give it 99.99 per cent in the race and 100 per cent on a qually lap, then you'd need a flap.

Soft suspension

As I mentioned about those two higher-speed corners at Turns 4/5, the front of the car doesn't feel quite as nailed as I would have thought. There are a couple of things to consider here though... I've driven Formula 1 for a lot of years and then in DTM, where the cars are totally connected to the track, because the team and the driver have the absolute set-up for the lap.

The 908 wing offers plenty of rear downforce, but the front wasn't as nailed

This car was built with a different race in mind, so it comes with some margin in it. And when you're racing to the top of a mountain with no run-off and clouds for crash barriers, maybe that's not such a bad thing...

The compliance of the suspension certainly underlines that confidence-giving theory.

I reckon with more and more time testing the car, and more and more time going up and down the mountain gaining confidence and knowledge of what was coming, the front end would be stiffened up quite a lot. As it is, it has a little of that soft-front, steer-from-the-rear feeling.

I can understand the reasons for this set-up. I grew up in the middle of the country and did a lot of my early driving around lanes where I was always reacting to the corner as it evolved and making up the apex, in effect.

A lot of my road skills were reactive and I'd imagine that's what it's like for Sebastien in this case - this was a Tarmac stage with no notes, and you needed to retain that ability to react to things in the car.

On a lap, you know corner to corner what the car will do, what sort of load each wheel will have, where the slip is and what the optimal speed will be at entry, apex and exit - Sebastien and the team didn't really have that up the mountain.

Rudimentary gearbox

This is old technology and there's no getting around that. Coming from a world of seamless shifts in Formula 1, in this car it feels like you're being hit on the back of the helmet by a hammer every time you go up a gear.

Not only is it clunky, but also pretty bloody annoying, knowing what's available from a modern F1 car. It's like me taking away your multi-function telephone and giving you an early Motorola brick. Yes, you can make a telephone call, but you can only do it slowly.

At the time, when we didn't know any better, we thought those phones were amazing, but once you've seen a smartphone you wouldn't want to go back.

This car was built to a budget and with an element of compromise, but if it was to go up against another car with seamless shifts, with a driver of the same ability, it would lose. I reckon an F1-style gearbox would be worth 1.5 to two seconds across an eight-minute 'lap'.

Coulthard reckons a better gearbox could be worth up to two seconds on a Pikes Peak run

'Numb' steering

The response from the car is relatively numb, but that could well be a characteristic of the four-wheel drive.

When you drive four-wheel-drive road cars, you do tend to get that little bit of wander because of the different tolerances through the front wheels, which you don't get in a rear-drive car.

Brilliant traction

Obviously, the traction is very, very good in the car because of the four-wheel drive and you always feel there is plenty of grip there for you. That's where the car would have really excelled in the slow corners, and it's kind of a shame that we only have one slow corner on this track.

DC's conclusions

The Peugeot 208 T16 is a tremendous amount of fun to drive. I would love to have spent longer with it and tried to work on the settings and then the lap times. There's no doubt that what Peugeot has produced is a fine piece of engineering, but a lot of it came from the parts from an endurance programme and it relied on the ability of a very, very talented driver. I'm talking about Sebastien at Pikes Peak rather than me at Spielberg.

Having had a go, I'm now ready to go and watch Seb going up the mountain. Maybe I'll have a go there next time...

LOEB'S GUIDE TO DC

Track time is running down when, typically, the clouds finally delivered. Today is the day Sebastien Loeb will drive his record-breaking Peugeot in the wet. For the first time.

We'd arrived at a Red Bull Ring basking not only in the news that Formula 1 would be coming back, but also 37-degree temperatures. It was an absolute scorcher as Peugeot Sport carefully extracted its astonishing one-off machine from the back of a plain silver truck.

Installed in the pit garage, pre-start checks run through, the car was fired and idled on axle stands. The warm-up was completed with a dash up and down the gearbox and a couple of lock-to-locks to make sure the laptop was happy with the hydraulic fluid pressure and temperature.

Loeb into the car, slicks out of the blankets... and a clap of thunder louder even than the tick-over of two very big turbos. Bugger.

It wasn't even drizzle; it was full-on, flat-out rain. The pit lane was covered in 10 seconds and comfortably underwater in less than a minute. The slicks went back into their covers.

Fifteen minutes later and the rain eases. The track is sodden, but slowly clearing of standing water.

"We go out?" says Loeb.

We do what?

"Why not?" he adds, with a shrug and a smile.

Why not indeed?

Loeb didn't let a downpour curtail running

Warmed wets were bolted on and with a knock, a bang and a whistle, Loeb pulls first gear and departs the garage.

And flicks the wipers on for the first time ever.

Four laps later and he is back in. The car is warm, the track getting drier and drier. Everything is ready for Coulthard.

After watching DC walk from one side of the car to the other, before asking... "Which side do I get in?" I suddenly felt a little nervous. This is Peugeot's only child. And now AUTOSPORT - via an admittedly world renowned F1 star - is being left to babysit.

"He will have no problem," says Loeb, sensing momentary unease. "For him it will be an easy car to drive. For sure, the power shouldn't impress him - not with what he knows. The braking is good, he can go quite late and finding the limit will be the thing which takes a little time.

"Four-wheel drive will be new to him, but if you don't slide then it's just giving you some more stability. OK, there might be more traction from the one hairpin at the other side of the track, but that's all.

"It was wet when I went there, but it is drying now and if he takes second out of this corner, I think this car could be quicker than a Formula 1 car out of there - but that's maybe the only place, because the rest of the circuit is maybe too fast for the gearbox we have in this car. We hit the rev limiter four times in top gear on the laps I just did."

The data shows that even on his out-lap, his first time on rain tyres in the wet, Loeb is on the limiter in top within seconds of being out of the pitlane.

"It was interesting in the wet," he smiles. "Just one time before I drove and it was a little bit humid, but not like this. The four-wheel drive helps, it felt OK.

"You could slide the car, but when you have too much angle in the car then you start to wonder where the car wants to go... I could feel the downforce working, but I was too slow in the really fast corners to feel it so much - there was not so much grip on the line. The place I really felt the downforce here was in the braking and that was good.

"I am very glad it didn't rain on the startline in Pikes Peak. It would have been the same for everybody and I think we still had the best car for the race, but the sensation would not have been the same. It would have been slow. And we wanted the record."

Peugeot's 908 Le Mans racer provided much of the 208 T16's DNA © LAT

THE STORY BEHIND THE 'FRANKEN-PUG'

Jean-Christophe Pallier, the chief engineer of Peugeot Sport, breaks into a smile.

"When did we finish the design study?" he says, inquisitively. "When we finished building the car!"

This project was given the green light at the end of November last year, having first been dreamed up by team principal Bruno Famin a couple of months earlier.

Peugeot has a history with Pikes Peak. If you're not familiar with that history, type the words: dance, climb, Vatanen and Ari into YouTube...

Peugeot's and Colorado's biggest mountain go back a bit. And, in light of the loss of the 908 endurance programme, there was a gap in the motorsport side of the business.

The customer department was busying itself with a raft of new rally cars - including the stunning 208 T16 - but there was nothing for the factory to get its teeth into. Until Famin thought about returning the Lion to the top of that mountain.

The first work on the car started on December 1 and, as soon as parts were being drawn, they were being produced. All of the car's aero work was done on the computer - there was no time for the wind tunnel.

"We took a lot from the 908," says Pallier, "and we thought about the engine as well, but the diesel was a little too heavy and, having eight cylinders, it was too long. Also, it had only one fuel pump - we needed more and there wasn't time for this to be designed."

The car tested for the first time four months after pencil was put to paper, at Peugeot's test track in south-west Paris. A week later, Sebastien Loeb was introduced to the team.

"We started the project without Sebastien," says Pallier. "When we started, we didn't know who would drive, but when we asked, he was very happy!"

By June the car had moved to the far side of the Atlantic and the serious testing was under way.

Peugeot hadn't confirmed Loeb when it began the project

"The only things Sebastien wanted was a shorter ratio in the gears and some small set-up changes," says Pallier. "This was good, because we had no time for anything more."

And then, at 11am local time on June 30, the car was fired at the first corner proper.

"We all waited at the bottom of the hill," says Pallier. "It is difficult in the mountains to get the internet, so we had hired our own antenna to help with this, but just at the big moment - it went down. We had no splits. Nothing.

"I timed from my own watch and got to nine minutes, I thought: "Something is wrong..." But it was fine. It was a good day."

TECH SPEC

Engine: 3.2 litre, V6 twin turbo
Position: mid-rear
Max power: 875bhp
Max torque: 650lb ft
Gearbox: six-speed sequential, column-mounted paddle shift
Bodywork: carbon
Suspension: double wishbone/torsion bars/dampers all round
Brakes: 380mm carbon front/355mm carbon rear
Wheels: 18x13-in mag-alloy
Tyres: 31/71x18
Length: 4500mm
Width: 2000mm
Height: 1300mm
Weight: 875kg