How a troubled racer became the last great Group C car

During the 1990 German Grand Prix, I bumped into Keke Rosberg, whom I had known for several years - we had worked together during our Fittipaldi and McLaren days in Formula 1. Keke had been hired by Peugeot to drive the new 905 Group C sportscar but, as he confided to me, it was a bit of a disaster and was in need of some serious engineering input. Would I be interested in going to help out with the project?

At the time I was Gerhard Berger's race engineer at McLaren and was coming to the end of a seven-year period with the team. Was this the itch I needed to immerse myself in a different project? Unfortunately, about a year or so earlier, I had been to see Ron Dennis about the engineers having proper signed contracts, to which he agreed.

Therefore, having made the decision to leave the team and join Peugeot, I had to relay this information to Ron, who prided himself in keeping key members of the team together and happy. He was more than upset and, to prove the point, had his lawyers come up with a solution that basically cost me about a month's wages.

There then followed a couple of interviews with Jean Todt, the boss of Peugeot Talbot Sport, during which he outlined his plan for the team and what he expected my role to be. There were to be two cars entered into the 1991 Sportscar World Championship, with me engineering the one driven by Keke and Yannick Dalmas (another ex-F1 driver), and Jean-Claude Vaucard engineering the second car, driven by Philippe Alliot and Mauro Baldi. Andre de Cortanze was the tech director.

The workshop at Velizy on the outskirts of Paris was one enormous factory unit, housing not only the 905 project but also all the other Peugeot racing series of that time. At the far end of the building was the engine shop and stores, but the offices, drawing office and all administration ran around three sides on the first floor of the building.

I remember one time a company coming in to check the fire alarms, but the ceiling in the workshop was so high that when they sent smoke upwards, it plateaued before hitting the sensors.

The mechanics were all from the rally programmes and were mostly French, with the exception of the number one on my car, Carlos, who was Portuguese but spoke fluent French and good English.

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A later addition to the team was the son of Sacha Distel. For those who don't know who Distel was, not only was he was a famous singer and actor (he recorded Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head from the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), but he was married to an equally famous woman, Francine, who was a member of the French Olympic downhill ski team, and was also a very good friend of Mr Todt; you can see the connection.

The chassis was horribly over-engineered and heavy, with the front suspension fixings set into the sides of the monocoque and therefore non-adjustable

One of the biggest problems for me at the beginning of my tenure was that the meetings with board members of Peugeot were all, unsurprisingly, in French. Todt insisted that I would have to improve my schoolboy French and therefore hired a succession of pretty female teachers who, although very easy on the eye, didn't really grasp the fact that what I needed was an insight to the technical language. In the end, I think I learned more from the mechanics than the teachers!

The whole ethos behind the 905 was that, as it was a Peugeot, it had to look like a racing version of one of the road cars and so had been styled by the car company. In its first iteration it looked very pretty and had vague similarities to the 205/405 series, which Peugeot had successfully raced and rallied, including the fearsome 405 Pikes Peak car with which Ari Vatanen had created a new course record.

Todt himself had been a successful co-pilot in both the Talbot Sunbeam Lotus and the Peugeot 205 and was already becoming known for his managerial skills, so he soon assumed the overall leadership of Groupe PSA (Peugeot Societe Anonyme) competition, then going on to create Peugeot Talbot Sport.

The chassis was designed and built by Dassault, the French aerospace company, in carbon, but was horribly over-engineered and heavy, with the front suspension fixings set into the sides of the monocoque and therefore non-adjustable. The best bit I always thought about the chassis was the windscreen, which had double-curvature and was heated (like the fighter aircraft) and probably cost a fortune.

Peugeot had completed several tests with Jean-Pierre Jabouille before sending one car to run in the last two races of 1990 in Canada and Mexico, which guaranteed the team an entry into the next season. Although it proved to be fairly quick compared to the other normally aspirated cars, Keke realised a lot more work was required to turn it into a winning option.

There were two main problems with the initial car, one being the aerodynamics and the other the gearbox.

In an effort to appease the car company, Todt had asked La Garenne to design and build the gearbox, which turned out to be an 80kg monster! For some reason they had decided to run four gears ahead of the final drive, with the other two and reverse behind, connected by a long shaft. It was this shaft that would regularly break, plus it had a fragile manual gearchange linkage.

As I said, the styling was fashioned by the car company and, while it looked slippery, they had not taken into account what effect a large flat floor would have on the aerodynamics. The result was what the French call 'pompage'.

Essentially, what this translated to was the car being sucked down at the front due to low pressure and then releasing violently when the floor bottomed out; behaving a bit like a flapping fish on dry land. To combat this, we had to run very stiff front springs and anti-roll bar while being fairly soft on damping so that we could regain some grip.

We struggled through the first half of the 1991 season with a variety of mechanical problems (nearly all engine-related), although our sister car managed to win the first race of 1991 at Suzuka, mainly by default as the opposition all fell by the wayside. But it was at this first race where we realised just how far we were behind the Jaguar XJR-14s when they lapped nearly four seconds faster than anybody else.

The second race at Monza turned out to be embarrassing, not only because the Jaguars scored a 1-2, but also when we came to the first pitstop. I had warned Yannick that the new pits had a section in front of the garages that was smooth concrete, and to be careful when braking. He didn't heed my warning and came in at normal speed, locked up on the concrete and took out the refuelling rig and one of the mechanics! I remember Keke looking at me and just shaking his head in disbelief.

Le Mans was a disaster, as we were ill-prepared, with both cars failing before the four-hour mark. My car stopped on the Mulsanne Straight when the gear linkage fell apart. Keke was driving at the time, and before we could establish a proper radio conversation with him he exited the car and walked away.

In the regulations it says that if the driver leaves the car by more than five metres, it is deemed to have been abandoned. Had he stayed with it, we could have talked him through removing the rear bodywork to find the problem. In retrospect, I can't imagine Keke being remotely interested in doing that.

During a two-month break in the season, much work was undertaken to improve the car, not only with the engine, but to make the car more consistent to drive. This included a double-tier rear wing, the lower element designed to help the underbody, and the addition of a front wing to create the 905 Evo 1 Bis.

This transformed the performance in every area, so much so that we were actually able to challenge the Jaguars for the lead at the Nurburgring. Sadly, Keke, having started third on the grid, had a coming-together with a slower car and didn't finish, but the sister car held the lead for some laps before depositing its oil onto the circuit.

The turning point really came at Magny-Cours, where we had performed a lot of the testing with the improved chassis. It turned out that there was so much Michelin rubber on the circuit that the Goodyears, which almost all the opposition were running, wouldn't work and we completely dominated the weekend and finished 1-2, with Keke and Yannick leading the Baldi/Alliot car.

One of the biggest changes we made to the car was to abandon the overweight gearbox and use a bespoke design by Xtrac which not only improved the engine response due to the faster gearshifts but also improved the weight distribution enormously

We repeated this feat at the penultimate round in Mexico City, before heading back to Japan, where the last race was held at Autopolis (pictured below), a very strange circuit in the centre of an extinct volcano. The most peculiar feature of this circuit is a one-in-10 uphill section, but it is a spectacular setting, although not easy to access - it was at least 45 minutes from any other signs of life (and hotels).

There were many rumours of the project having been funded by the Japanese mafia - stories abounded of bodies in the concrete structures. But there were other amazing features such as a climate-controlled art gallery on the top floor of the pit complex. Many very expensive pieces of art adorned the walls in subdued lighting. Surrounding the vast paddock behind the pits were about 30 individual garages, each one containing an iconic car, such as a Rolls-Royce, a Ferrari and a Ford Mustang, plus many more.

This race marked the appearance of Toyota, which had decided to join the fray in readiness for the 1992 season. The Tony Southgate-penned car proved to be fast and reliable in its first outing, which was a slight worry for Peugeot.

At the end of the season, Rosberg decided to call it a day - this was a great disappointment for me, but at least we had managed to win two of the races that year. His replacement, I learned, was to be Derek Warwick, as Jaguar had decided to quit the series along with Sauber-Mercedes.

At Todt's behest, we embarked on an intensive testing programme over the winter of 1991-92 as we searched for reliability and his dream of winning the Le Mans 24 Hours.

With his incredible influence and range of contacts, we were able to conduct one 24-hour test every month from October through to March. You can't imagine how cold Paul Ricard becomes in winter, with its situation quite high above sea level. The circuit at the time did not have the chicane in the middle of the 1.5km Mistral back straight, so to make it more like the Mulsanne we installed a makeshift chicane using plastic bollards.

The cars were set up in Le Mans specification, without the front wing and a reduced-section rear wing. We had all the drivers on call, including Jabouille and Mark Blundell, who were to be the third drivers in the regular cars. Later in the programme we introduced a third car, engineered by Paolo Catone, who had been in the Peugeot drawing office and had been responsible for a lot of the chassis design. Of course, he would go on to design the very successful Peugeot 908 hybrid cars.

I remember one test while running in the night, I noticed that the times were getting close to a daytime mark and started thinking that something suspicious was going on. It later transpired, when the drivers confessed, that they (mainly Alliot and Jabouille) had gradually been nudging the plastic bollards of the chicane until they could almost drive straight through. They may have thought this ingenious, but they missed the point that we were trying to see how long the brakes would last.

Gradually we ironed out all the faults and, through painstaking attention in pitstops, honed the mechanics in the art of changing brake discs and pads quickly, as well as finding the most efficient way to change tyres, and remove and replace bodywork.

One of the biggest changes we made to the car was to abandon the overweight gearbox and use a bespoke design by Xtrac. I had come to know Mike Endean during my time at McLaren and so convinced the Peugeot board to sign him up. Thank goodness, they agreed and Mike came up with a lightweight magnesium casing that housed the latest technology with a sequential gearshift system. This not only improved the engine response due to the faster gearshifts but also improved the weight distribution enormously.

The 1992 season started at Monza and, although we knew Toyota had also spent the winter putting their car through its paces in Australia, we were confident that we had the edge. It started well, with Yannick putting our car on pole, and we led most of the race until the final few laps, when he was having trouble with the brakes.

Two laps from the end, he locked up, spun and gracefully landed upside down in a gravel trap. Luckily, he was unhurt and, although this allowed Toyota the win, there were so many other retirements that we were still classified in second.

Silverstone was next, with a return to form in qualifying, but the race was a series of mishaps (Yannick stopping to have his seat belts tightened), and a flash fire during refuelling put us nearly a lap behind the Toyota. However, after their last pitstop, the Toyota ground to a halt and Derek cruised to an unlikely win.

We took six cars to Le Mans, three for qualifying and three for the race, as there was nothing in the regulations to prevent us doing this. The third car was to be piloted by Karl Wendlinger (who I later worked with at Sauber in F1), Eric van de Poele and Alain Ferte.

The sister car of Alliot/Baldi/Jabouille took pole position with my car, with Derek, Yannick and Mark one second behind, but in third place was the Toyota of Geoff Lees/David Brabham/Ukyo Katayama, some four seconds adrift.

Todt ordered me to pit my car so that we could check our exhaust, thereby relinquishing the lead to the third car. We found nothing wrong, so continued without further interruptions and ended up second

The race started with our cars on intermediate tyres as the rain had been falling for most of the day. Our drivers were taking it easy, but the Mazda, based on the XJR-14, nipped past both of our cars and was still ahead after the first hour.

During the first pitstops, we gained an advantage when all our drivers decided they could do a double stint. We took the lead that was to last until the end of the 24 hours, although we had a scare on the Sunday morning when Derek reported that the engine was cutting out. He managed to return to the pits and that allowed us to replace the battery and ECU, but a few laps later the same thing happened, and we realised that the voltage regulator had failed, and the battery was unable to charge.

Once this was replaced, the car ran faultlessly to the end. Our sister car managed to salvage third place following a myriad of problems, but unfortunately the third car succumbed to an engine failure. Todt had realised his goal, but I always felt that there was an underlying resentment that it wasn't the predominantly French car that had won.

The last three races of the Championship were shared between our two cars, with Alliot/Baldi winning at Donington Park and Magny-Cours, and 'my' car the race at Suzuka, but this was enough for Warwick and Dalmas to wrap up the championship.

Unfortunately, the entries into this season's championship were dwindling, with only eight appearing at the last round, three of which were Peugeots. This meant the end of Group C, with only the prospect of Le Mans being available for the 905 in 1993.

During the latter part of the year we had worked on a slightly controversial version of the 905 called the Evolution 2, with an F1-type nose section carrying a full-width wing and two large flaps. The front wheelarches were separate and fixed to the wing at the front and a couple of aero panels to the nose at the rear. This proved to change the car's dynamics significantly as not only did it give too much front grip, but somehow was spoiling the air to the diffuser.

After a few tests we decided to take it to Magny-Cours for Warwick/Dalmas, but it soon became obvious that the rear end was struggling with all the changes of direction and the tyres were not coping, therefore it wasn't raced.

Things were getting very political at Peugeot as we headed into 1993 as Jacques Calvet, who was then head of PSA (Peugeot and Citroen), was trying to also make his way into politics. He was not a fan of sportscar racing and preferred rallying, as he thought this aligned more with road cars, and so was pushing Todt to abandon the 905 programme.

However, Todt wanted one more crack at Le Mans and so again we prepared the three cars, but instead of Warwick/Blundell joining Dalmas, we employed Thierry Boutsen and Teo Fabi. The third car this time was driven by Geoff Brabham/Christophe Bouchut/Eric Helary, again engineered by Catone.

During the race, which we dominated, the Alliot/Baldi/Jabouille car again had multiple problems, including an issue with their exhausts, which cracked and broke. Todt ordered me to pit my car so that we could check our exhaust, thereby relinquishing the lead to the third car. We found nothing wrong, so continued without further interruptions and ended up second, with the Alliot/Baldi/Jabouille car recovering to third.

For me it was a disappointing end to a very enjoyable time with Peugeot, especially as the other project we had been planning was to design and build an F1 car using the V10 engine.

Peugeot had employed Enrique Scalabroni to design the car and between us we were a long way down the line when Calvet finally pulled the plug on any development in racing. The only cherry on the cake for me was that Boutsen convinced me to go and engineer his F1 drive with Jordan, but that's another story!

Warwick on the Peugeot project

By Kevin Turner

Derek Warwick was one of Peugeot's main rivals in 1991, driving the goalpost-moving Jaguar XJR-14. Indeed, had it not been for a team blunder that denied him the points for victory at Silverstone, he would have won the Sportscar World Championship that year.

Warwick did achieve that accolade with Jean Todt's Peugeot team in 1992 alongside Yannick Dalmas but, like his engineer Tim Wright, he recalls that a lot of work had to be done to make it happen.

He had already decided to switch to the French manufacturer even before Jaguar's withdrawal from the category.

"Even if you didn't have a suspension issue the suspension guy would want to talk. After an hour I got up and said, 'Jean, this is not going to work', and I walked out" Derek Warwick

"The move was going to happen anyway," recalls Warwick. "Jean was already talking to me. We stalled because of money, like all racing drivers! I showed him my Jaguar contract and we ended up with an agreement.

"I wanted to drive the old Peugeot and it was laborious. The gearbox was heavy and the car was heavy. It was nowhere near as light and nimble as the XJR-14. But Tim had already told me what the team was doing and I had the right people around me. That gave me the confidence.

"The 1992 car was much better, though the gearbox was still fragile. It had a great engine. It also had Michelins and usually when I drove on Michelins I had the best tyre. The aero was not bad, but it was nowhere near the XJR-14. I still think the XJR-14 would have beaten it."

Even so, it wasn't just the car that needed to improve.

"At the very first debrief at the first test it felt like we had 500 people there," says Warwick.

"And in that sort of situation everyone has to be the most important person in the room. Even if you didn't have a suspension issue the suspension guy would want to talk. After an hour I got up and said, 'Jean, this is not going to work', and I walked out.

"Later Jean found me and I said, 'If you want to win Le Mans and the world championship you have to change the whole structure. You have your engineer, your chief designer and the drivers. If you have a problem, you bring the right person in.' And at the very next debrief it was exactly that."

The improved 905 Evo 1 Bis lost out to Toyota at the opening round at Monza, but Peugeot wouldn't be beaten again during the campaign and Warwick took his one and only Le Mans win. Like Wright, Warwick too suspects that the management may have wanted the 'more-French' car of Philippe Alliot, Mauro Baldi and Jean-Pierre Jabouille to win at Le Mans to win, but never felt there was any bias in the team.

"I think deep down Jean wanted the 'French' car to win, but he never showed that to me," he says. "The team is built around the drivers, and the mechanics and engineers don't care where you're from. If you handle it right, they want you to win."

Le Mans was the focus and the team did huge amounts of testing. Warwick doesn't recall any bollard shenanigans - "That's typical Alliot and Jabouille" - but has other Paul Ricard memories.

"Just before Le Mans we were testing with Mark Blundell," says Warwick. "Yannick was in the car and me and Mark went to the chicane. When he arrived we both pulled mooneys and all you could hear was a big lock-up! We did so much testing at Ricard. We didn't do 24-hour testing - we did 36 hours, until something broke."

Warwick kept his eye on the prize at Le Mans and wasn't worried when the other Peugeot made a bid for pole.

"We were not bothered," he says. "We were working on race set-up. And looking after the gearbox - we knew that was the weak link."

The approach paid off in the hard-fought contest, the second Peugeot and challenging Toyota hitting troubles late on, leaving Warwick, Dalmas and Blundell to win by six laps. And Todt made a decision towards the end that has stayed with Warwick.

"Jean pulled Yannick out and let a British driver finish the race. It was his thank you to me and it was a pretty special moment" Derek Warwick

"Jean knew everything that I'd been through with my brother [Paul Warwick had been killed in a British Formula 3000 crash at Oulton Park the year before] and how much it would mean to me to win Le Mans," he says.

"With half an hour to go Jean brought the car in for a spruce-up. He pulled Yannick out and let a British driver finish the race. It was his thank you to me and it was a pretty special moment."

After Le Mans, Dalmas and Warwick won at Suzuka and comfortably beat Alliot and Baldi to the title. Warwick had the option to continue or go to Indycars, but ended up returning to F1 with Footwork. He has good memories of the campaign and working with Wright.

"Tim was a conservative, gentle guy - a great engineer," says Warwick. "He knew how to get the best out of the car and bought into how to win Le Mans. He was an important part of winning the championship and the 24 Hours.

"It was nice racing for Peugeot as a company. Everyone wanted to win."