Why Peugeot had no choice but to revamp its radical Le Mans Hypercar

It somehow seemed incongruous given what we knew was around the corner. The sight of a Peugeot heading the chase of the leader over a full race distance in the World Endurance Championship season-opener in Qatar earlier this month was a first and also a bit strange.

That was because it was the soon-to-be-replaced original version of the 9X8, a car that had previously only shown flashes of speed, putting in the starring performance. But its pace in the desert proved exactly why the French manufacturer had no choice but to abandon the wingless concept of its original Le Mans Hypercar.

The avant-garde Peugeot worked around the 3.37-mile Losail International Circuit in a way it had never in the past. The combination of a track layout with a high proliferation of medium to fast corners and a surface that was both billiard-table smooth and what can be described as low energy made it a happy hunting ground for a car that had finished no better than third since its debut at Monza in July 2022. The 9X8 would have bowed out with a career high second position but for a few missing litres of fuel in the 2024 season-opener.

What the original 9X8 didn’t like were low-speed corners, bumps and, to a less extent, rougher asphalt. They were the enemy of a car designed around a concept that allowed Peugeot do away with a conventional rear wing. It took advantage of the equal size front and rear tyres demanded in the original LMH regulations and the freedoms in the aero rules, and then came up with a car that generated the majority of its downforce from the underfloor and had a 50/50 front/rear weight distribution.

The problem was that when the ride height had to be picked up on bumpy tracks, it lost downforce. Most importantly it was compromised on traction in the slow-speed stuff as a result of the narrow tyres at the rear and struggled with tyre wear as a consequence.

There were times when it worked, when the car was in the ballpark, most notably at the Le Mans 24 Hours and the subsequent Monza round when it picked up its only piece of silverware. But there were others, most notably at Sebring at the start of last season and then Fuji and Bahrain at its end where the 9X8 was nowhere.

The organisers couldn’t — or perhaps wouldn’t — accommodate the Peugeot under the Balance of Performance, the means by which the playing field in Hypercar is meant to be levelled. There’s a new system of BoP, new methodology and a new, wider range of adjustment, which played its part in Qatar, but would it have been able to have ensured the mk1 9X8 was competitive across a full range of circuits?

On the final outing for the mk1 version of the 9X8, it came close to finishing second in Qatar - but in circumstances that were unlikely to be repeated in 2024

Photo by: Shameem Fahath

Peugeot Sport technical director Olivier Jansonnie believes so, or at that least that’s what he’s saying. But I’m not so sure he truly believes it. His comments kind of back me up.

“It is what we have always said, and now we have a clear demonstration of that at least in Qatar that the BoP could balance us,” he says. “If you look at our performance in Qatar versus the other LMH cars the fact is that it was sufficient to balance us and put us back in the right performance window. Our feeling is that it is also possible to do it on other tracks, probably most of the tracks.”

Jansonnie explains that the reason why Peugeot chose to abandon the original concept of the 9X8 was to ensure it was less susceptible to the vagaries of the BoP. He admits that the car was in a “corner of adjustment” at this year’s WEC curtain-raiser.

"The main factor for the decision to change the car was to rely less on the BoP, which we cannot control" 
Olivier Jansonnie

The car was down at 1030kg, the new minimum weight for four-wheel-drive LMH machinery, and up at 520kW (697bhp), the maximum power allowed, in Qatar. That meant there was no scope to give it a helping hand at other circuits where it might be needed. Given that the 9X8 was maxed out under the BoP at what might well have been the perfect circuit for the thing, there’s every reason to believe that its performance could only fall back at other tracks.

It was a risk that Peugeot couldn’t take, Jansonnie acknowledges. Switching tyres to the wider rears and narrower fronts of its competitors was the only way to “get rid of the trap” in which it found itself. “The main factor for the decision to change the car was to rely less on the BoP, which we cannot control,” he adds.

The new car complete with a rear wing will no doubt please the naysayers. There were many who proclaimed, “How long before we see a rear wing on that thing” when the 9X8 was launched the world in June 2021. Others pointed to the salutary lessons of Peugeot’s history in sportscar racing.

More than 30 years ago, the road car stylists got their hands on the original version of its 905 3.5-litre Group C car. It was given the look of the Oxia concept, a machine that was meant to set the styling trends for Peugeot across its forthcoming range. It only lasted six races before a massive aero programme changed its look — and its fortunes. The revised 905, of course, went on to win Le Mans in both 1992 and ’93.

Peugeot's original Group C effort - pictured on debut at Montreal in 1990 - also had to be categorically revamped before it was competitive, but on this occasion fault cannot be laid at the manufacturer's door

Photo by: David Hutson / Motorsport Images

What we can’t say is that Peugeot got it wrong this time, that it made the incorrect choices or that it was trying to be too clever by half with its radical or rather unusual design philosophy. It designed the mk1 version of the 9X8 to the rules as they stood and reckoned it could create a competitive machine that looked different, out of this world even.

That was how the LMH regulations were framed, and LMDh too. The rules were conceived to allow the styling departments to get involved without compromising the performance of the new breed of racing machine. The performance targets laid down for both downforce and drag, an essential tenet of the LMH regulations, are suitably modest to allow that to happen.

The problem was that the rules changed. Multiple times. Peugeot was a victim of the regulatory shifts that followed the announcement in January 2020 of the LMP2-based LMDh category that gave an alternative route in the Hypercar class of the WEC.

The reduction of the maximum weight from 1100kg in LMH to 1030 for two-wheel-drive cars and 1040 for all-wheel-drive machinery in the months that followed the historic convergence announcement on the eve of the Daytona 24 Hours set in motion a sequence of events that eventually did for the Peugeot’s off-the-wall concept.

The rules for all-wheel-drive LMHs, as they stood when Peugeot signed up for the WEC in November 2019, mandated the tyre option run by Peugeot on the first 9X8; the equal size 31/31 tyres rather than the 29/34 allowed for rear-drive, non-hybrid machinery such as the Glickenhaus-Pipo 007. That gave Toyota, the first manufacturer to race an LMH and the only one to run a hybrid until Peugeot’s arrival in the WEC in mid-2022, a problem.

The GR010 was already in build when the minimum weight was lowered along with maximum power. Don’t forget that the LMH was due to come into force in September 2020 at the start of the 2020/21 season before COVID wreaked havoc with the international motorsport calendar.

The Japanese manufacturer claimed its design was unfairly compromised by the change in terms of weight distribution, which was having a negative effect on tyre life. It was able to successfully argue at the end of the car’s maiden season in 2021 for a switch to the 29/34 option, the same to be run by the LMDhs heading for the series in 2023. At the same time the rules were subtly tweaked: from year one of the LMH v LMDh battle, the 31/31 route would be closed.

This came too late for Peugeot. The 9X8 was already close to completion and would run for the first time in December ’21. It was stuck with the 31/31 tyres, even though it knew that the 29/34 was potentially the better option.

Running the same wheel sizes at the front and back was known to be a disadvantage, but Peugeot believed it had no other option

Photo by: Eric Le Galliot

According to Jansonnie, it “identified a performance difference with an advantage to the 29/24” early on in the programme. To that effect it sought clarification on the tyre size rules during the design process — it wasn’t actually clear in the text — only to be told that a front-drive hybrid had to use 31/31 rubber.

Even so, it still believed that the BoP could accommodate the differential of which Jansonnie speaks. But here, Peugeot was undone by convergence.

The manufacturers committed to the rear-drive-only LMDh concept knew that front-wheel traction was going to be a significant — unsurmountable, even — advantage for the LMHs with the original deployment speed of 120km/h. They argued that those advantages had to be mitigated, which is why the speed at which hybrid power could be used at the front wheels was taken out of the technical regulations and made part of the BoP from 2022.

Big picture circumstances beyond Peugeot’s control essentially derailed its ambition to have a car that was both different looking and competitive

Deployment for the Toyota and, from last year, Ferrari’s 499P has been nailed in at 190km/h in the dry ever since. For Peugeot it has been 150km/h with the exception of the Fuji and Bahrain races last year when it was reduced to 135km/h, still some way above 120km/h.

That suggests that there was an unwillingness on the part of the rule makers, the FIA and the Automobile Club de l’Ouest, to give the Peugeot the help it needed, to go down to the deployment speed for which the 9X8 was designed. The limitation of having less rubber on the road at the rear in terms of traction could potentially have been levelled up with a bit more at the front earlier in the corner. “Unfortunately after one year,” said Peugeot Sport boss Jean-Marc Finot at Bahrain last year, “we see that the BoP is not fulfilling expectations.”

As to the question whether the series governance wanted Peugeot to make the change, perhaps exerted some pressure, Jansonnie replies in the negative.

“I don’t think we felt direct pressure to change,” he says. “But what was very clear was that from the regulatory standpoint they closed this door to make sure no one else could go with those tyre dimensions. That’s a fact. The second fact is that, for sure, coming back for us to the same tyre dimension as our competitors is making the BoP process much, much easier.”

At circuits like Fuji, the original 9X8 really struggled with traction in low-speed corners

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

It is difficult to argue with that fact, which was clearly the reasoning for closing the door on 31/31 tyres after the 2021 season. That has to be good for the WEC moving forward, as was Peugeot’s unusual concept in the first place. It grasped the opportunities presented by the rules in a way that no other manufacturer has, as good looking as all the modern breed of prototypes are.

Big picture circumstances beyond Peugeot’s control — which have also been for the greater good of sportscar racing, it should be pointed out — essentially derailed its ambition to have a car that was both different looking and competitive. Convergence was the undoing of the 9X8.

But the good news is that the new 9X8 still looks like a 9X8. I just wish that they’d called it the 9X8 Evo 1 bis in the spirit of the reworked 905. Tipping its hat to a double Le Mans winner all these years on might have been a good omen.

Can the reconfigured 9X8 deliver Peugeot success in 2024?

Photo by: Peugeot Sport

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