Can Peugeot turn its style into substance at Le Mans?

This is the third coming of Peugeot in top-line sportscar racing. The 9X8 Le Mans Hypercar that arrived in the World Endurance Championship in July last year is making its first Le Mans 24 Hours appearance in 2023 and follows the 905 3.5-litre Group C and the 908 turbodiesel LMP1 projects that upheld the honour of France at the big race with a trio of victories between them. Yet neither won at the first attempt. The 2023 WEC formbook would need to be ripped up and then pushed through the shredder for Peugeot to make it number four next month.

There’s a parallel between the 905 programme that began nigh on 35 years ago and today’s 9X8, though it is not quite what it seems. The company stylists had a big hand in the original version of the V10-powered 905, a porpoising handful that needed a thorough redesign to become a successful double Le Mans winner. The inputs from outside the racing department in the design of today’s avant-garde LMH are also clear to see from its aggressive front to the rear devoid of a conventional rear wing. 

The LMH rules were framed to allow a Le Mans contender to be imbued with styling cues of the brand – and for them not to be a hinderance in any way. It’s what drew Peugeot back into endurance racing for a first campaign in the reborn WEC, a programme signed off nearly eight years on from a board decision that consigned the third, hybrid iteration of the 908 known as the HYBrid4 to the dustbin just a couple of months before the start of the 2012 season.  

“The reason was the freedom of design,” says Peugeot motorsport boss Jean-Marc Finot of the decision to return to sportscars made in November 2019. “It was mandatory for us to have a car that incorporated the Peugeot design code, and that is easily recognisable.”

The first prototype to emerge from a Peugeot Sport department established by Jean Todt in 1981 was very much recognisable as a Peugeot: it took its shape from a supercar concept known as the Oxia unveiled at the 1988 Paris motor show. The aerodynamics of the 905 that started racing at the back end of the 1990 World Sports-Prototype Championship were, says Peugeot regular, Philippe Alliot, “styled rather than designed”. British engineer Tim Wright, who joined Peugeot at the behest of star signing Keke Rosberg to help sort the car, reckons “the stylists had had a free hand”. He admits that he was “amazed that this thing that looked so good was so hopeless”.

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Just how hopeless became apparent – paradoxically – on the occasion of the first victory of the car. Peugeot drivers Alliot and Mauro Baldi lucked into victory at the opening round of a series renamed the Sportscar World Championship at Suzuka in April 1991. The 905 was the first pukka 3.5-litre Group C car, which meant there was little by way of a yardstick when it had turned up to the Montreal and Mexico City rounds of the WSPC in 1990.

While the initial 905 was a disaster, it prevailed after several revisions

Photo by: Rainer Schlegelmilch

Now it faced another clean-sheet 3.5-litre design, Jaguar’s goalpost-moving XJR-14. The best Peugeot had been a whopping 2.5 seconds behind the pole-winning British car in qualifying. Minor issues accounted for the Jags that day, but Peugeot knew it was in trouble. There was a sense of shock in the crisis meeting that followed at the old Peugeot Sport headquarters at Velizy on the outskirts of Paris.

“We sat there and asked, ‘What can we do?’,” remembers Alliot “We might have won the race, but we had seen how uncompetitive the car was.”

What Peugeot did was instigate a hurried, yet major development programme focused on aerodynamics that turned a recalcitrant machine into a competitive proposition inside three months. A car delightfully known as the 905 Evo 1 bis didn’t win straight out of the box at the Nurburgring, but it would notch up a 1-2 on home ground at Magny-Cours in September, Rosberg and Yannick Dalmas leading home Alliot/Baldi. It then repeated the trick, with the 905s in the same order, in Mexico City before the season was over. 

"I remember thinking that if they had put on all the downforce it would have ripped your head clean off your shoulders. It was a very physical car to drive" Geoff Brabham

Jaguar ended its programme in world championship sportscar racing after winning the 1991 SWC, leaving Peugeot to battle it out with Toyota and its new TS010. The 905 won five of the six races in 1992, Le Mans included after a major endurance test programme was put in place following a disastrous showing at the French classic on the last outing for the original iteration of the 905 in 1991. It was the first of back-to-back triumphs at the Circuit de la Sarthe. It bested Toyota again in 1993, finishing 1-2-3, on the only outing for the car after the death of SWC. 

All the drivers involved in the 905 project in its pomp look back at it with fond memories. Dalmas, who took the 1992 Le Mans victory together with Britons Derek Warwick and Mark Blundell, describes the Evo as “a virile racing car”.

“You had to be strong to drive that car,” remembers the four-time Le Mans winner. “The g-forces in the corners and under braking were unbelievable.”

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Geoff Brabham, who won at Le Mans in 1993 after being brought in to mentor young guns Christophe Bouchut and Eric Helary, has similar memories – and he only drove the car in low-downforce configuration.

“I remember thinking that if they had put on all the downforce it would have ripped your head clean off your shoulders,” he recalls. “It was a very physical car to drive.”

Blundell, Dalmas and Warwick celebrate winning the 1992 Le Mans 24 Hours for Peugeot

Photo by: LAT Photographic

The 905 was a triumph of development over design. Fast-forward 30 years, and development in a 1990s sense isn’t a luxury that Peugeot has with the 2.6-litre twin-turbo V6 9X8. The rules in the Hypercar class strictly limit performance modifications over the lifespan of a car: the technical specification is largely frozen on homologation before an LMH or LMDh can begin racing.

The task for the in-house Peugeot Sport team, now based at Satory a few miles down the road from Velizy on the outskirts of Paris, is to try to get the most out of an unconventional design that has yet to make much of an impact in six WEC outings so far. The French cars have been at the foot of the manufacturer pecking order in the three pre-Le Mans rounds this year. 

It is easy to reach the conclusion that the bosses at Peugeot – both on the design side and those above them – made some incorrect choices when it was conceptualising the 9X8, just like their predecessors. That’s too simplistic a view given how the sands shifted as the LMH rules and those for the LMP2-based LMDh category came together.

Olivier Jansonnie, technical director on the LMH programme at Satory, insists that the choices were correct when they were made. The door to the wingless concept was pushed invitingly wide open by the size of wheels and tyres a hybrid LMH had to run when the 9X8 was in design. This has since changed, one of a myriad of revisions to the rules since Peugeot announced its return to sportscar racing. A decrease in minimum weight from 1100 to 1040kg for an all-wheel-drive LMH and an increase in the deployment speed for the front-axle hybrid system to mitigate the handling gains are among the others. 

The LMH rules, as published, suggested that a manufacturer had two choices on tyre size: 31cm all round or 29cm front and 34cm rear. But that wasn’t actually the case, explains Jansonnie. Peugeot discussed the possibility of running the 29/34 option with rulemakers the FIA and the Automobile Club de l’Ouest, but was told that a four-wheel-drive hybrid as the 9X8 was always going to be had to go with 31/31. The second option was reserved for two-wheel-drive machinery, non-hybrid LMHs and the LMDhs.

That changed during the so-called convergence process. Now all new cars have to run 29/34, unless they were homologated and raced prior to this season. Toyota swapped from 31/31 to 29/34 with its GR010 HYBRID for the 2022 season, citing compromised weight distribution being to the detriment of tyre life. The same move for Peugeot wasn’t possible courtesy of its unusual concept. 

“The tyre choice made has driven the complete architecture of the car, including the 50-50 weight distribution and no rear wing,” says Jansonnie. “Why didn’t we change? It’s not just about putting wider rims at the rear and narrower rims at the front and changing the wishbones. It is much bigger than that. The change in rules came too late for us to be ready for racing in 2022.”

The rear wingless wonder 9X8 hasn't proven a hit in the WEC yet

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

Ask Jansonnie if Peugeot would have pushed on with the 9X8 as it is if it had known how the rules were going to change, and he replies: “That’s a good question. If we’d known what the regulations were going to become, we would probably have done things a bit differently.”

The 9X8 design team identified the 29/34 tyre option had advantages from the get-go, according to Jansonnie: “The fact that 29/34 is generating performance was clear to us, but when we made our choices it was not open to us.”

But Jansonnie refuses to say that the 9X8 has been belatedly compromised in concept: “It is clearly a car into which we put some effort on the styling. I don’t think it is costing us anything on the performance right now, we have no evidence of this.”

He does admit, however, that the narrow rears have played a role in the tyre degradation issues experienced so far. “We are struggling on tyres because of our tyre dimensions for sure, on some tracks and in some specific conditions,” he says.

There’s probably some time to go before we know if Peugeot can turn the 9X8 into a winner, perhaps with the help of the Balance of Performance, or whether it has to tear up the concept and start again

The focus for the moment at Peugeot is to create a reliable racing car. It has taken positive steps in that direction over the past two WEC races at Algarve and Spa in April, though there remain doubts about the reliability over 24 hours. 

“You can talk about performance and what effect the tyres will have [in terms of degradation], but the priority is to sort the reliability issues,” he explains. “We have to make sure the car can run long distances without problems, then the performance will come.”

There’s probably some time to go before we know if Peugeot can turn the 9X8 into a winner, perhaps with the help of the Balance of Performance, or whether it has to tear up the concept and start again. The rules allow a manufacturer to build an all-new car during the lifecycle of the rules.

Peugeot will no doubt come in for criticism if the 9X8 falls short again under the glare of the world – or more particularly the French media – at Le Mans. But then it’s used to getting a rough time of it.

The 908 claimed victory on its third Le Mans 24 Hours start in 2009

Photo by: Edd Hartley

Two iterations of the 908 turbodiesel – the V12 original and the V8 car known internally as the 90X – contested the 24 Hours five times and managed a single victory. History doesn’t look back on the programme kindly thanks to its meagre hit rate in the face of opposition from Audi at the race that mattered most. 

Yet the arrival of the 908 in 2007 set up one of the great rivalries in sportscar history. Their respective turbodiesels battled for glory all around the world and created two of the greatest ever editions of the 24 Hours at Le Mans in 2008 and 2011. That Peugeot was vanquished both times has undoubtedly influenced the way the 908 programme is now perceived, even though it scored the firm’s third Le Mans victory with a 1-2 in 2009.

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A trio of wins in the 24 Hours would have capped what is an amazing CV away from the Circuit de la Sarthe; Peugeot beat Audi more often than not. A tally of 25 wins from 35 starts included victories in the other two classics for which the 908s were eligible, the Sebring 12 Hours and the Petit Le Mans 1000-mile event at Road Atlanta. There were titles racked up along the way, too. Peugeot collected championship silverware in the Le Mans Series and the Intercontinental Le Mans Cup, the forerunner of the WEC.

But the 908 didn’t win Le Mans until the third attempt. The question is whether the 9X8 will get that long.

The 9XB will be decked out in a special Le Mans livery next month

Photo by: Peugeot Sport