Why Peugeot's sportscar return will capture the imagination

The arrival of Peugeot in the World Endurance Championship at Monza is a seismic event for me. Twice over.

It has to be a big deal because the French manufacturer should be regarded as one of the heavyweights of sportscar racing’s modern era with three Le Mans 24 Hours victories and another 30 wins to its name. But it’s significant for another reason: the Peugeot 9X8 Le Mans Hypercar racing for the first time this weekend is quite unlike anything we’ve seen before.

Whether you call the Peugeot’s shape and aerodynamics radical, avant-garde or just plain outlandish, it doesn’t matter. What’s important for me is that the thing looks fresh and new, from the tip of its growling nose to end of its wingless rear. And I hope it offers a portent of what’s to come as we head into what we all believe is going to be a golden era for sportscar racing.

PLUS: The wingless wonder Peugeot hopes will restore it to Le Mans glory

A grid-full of racing cars, to my mind, needs to be packed full of distinct-looking machinery. I say that as someone who became interested in motor racing in the mid-1970s on discovering something called Formula 1, grand prix racing, call it what you will.

My first motorsport memory is of seeing photographs of the Tyrrell P34 F1 car in a national newspaper as an eight-year old late in 1975. A car with six wheels, no less! No wonder the moment my father passed the paper across the kitchen table to his car-mad son is etched in my memory.

F1 properly entered my consciousness in the balmy summer of 1976 when the battle between James Hunt and Niki Lauda propelled what became my sport from the back to the front pages of the papers. Some time in the autumn that followed I inherited some old copies of a car magazine that carried decent F1 coverage - which makes me think it was Autocar - and my interest was truly ignited by the pictures before me.

I was transfixed by different cars on the grid, and they really were different - to each other. My first proper season of following F1 was 1977, the year I was given my first issue of Autosport and, quickly after that, became a regular reader. Think about it (or get googling if you’re too young), a Brabham BT45B certainly didn’t resemble a McLaren M26 nor a Ligier JS7.

Formula 1 cars in the 1970s had distinct traits that made them evidently different to the naked eye beyond their liveries

Photo by: David Phipps

It’s probably no coincidence that my favourite season of F1 is 1983. A mixture of new-build machinery and cut-and-shut upgrades after ground-effect tunnels were banned late the previous year resulted in a myriad of shapes.

We had the thing of beauty that was the Brabham BT52, Ferrari’s ungainly 126C2B and the weird-looking Ligier JS21. Then there was the downright ugly: the Lotus 92 and 93T with which the British team started the season before the arrival of another stunner in the 94T.

(I must add a caveat to my tale: 1983 was also my O-level year, so I was scratching around for any distraction from revision. I probably dropped a grade or two across my eight subjects as a result of my attention being diverted from my school books to the pages of Autosport and Grand Prix International.)

This is sportscar racing’s big chance to attract a wider audience to a genuinely first-class product. Cars that look the part - and look different to each other - will surely be one way that can be achieved

Sometimes I feel in the anodyne modern world of one-make formulae, limitations on development and strict homologation rules that we forget that our sport is called motor racing. It’s about the motors as well as the racing. We should not overlook the fact that sport in general is about storylines, something that differences in shape and form, as well as technology, help generate.

The Audi versus Porsche versus Toyota battles of the hybrid LMP1 era not long past resulted in some fantastic racing. But there was always a backstory because the manufacturers chose varying technical solutions to crack the efficiency nut and there was a near-constant stream of developments. (Porsche ended up on aero ‘kit 6’ for the run-in to its first championship season with the 919 Hybrid in 2015.) That was important at a time when the cars weren’t lookers and, to the casual observer, all appeared pretty much the same.

That’s the problem when the results of windtunnel and computational fluid dynamics programmes pretty much dictate the appearance of a racing car. When there’s a prescriptive set of regulations, the laws of physics will almost inevitably result an homogenous-looking stream of machinery that isn’t easy on the eye.

The rules for the LMH class offer manufacturers the chance to do something off the wall, and Peugeot has embraced them with open arms. Doing away with rules that dictate what you can and can’t do and instead laying down performance windows into which each car must fit was always one of the core principles of the new ruleset.

The targets for the aero are by design modest to reduce costs and performance, but also give the stylists a chance to have proper input. The same goes for the LMDh prototypes, though to a slightly lesser extent, that will join the LMHs on the WEC grid next year.

Its hoped that LMH rules which give manufacturers greater freedom within performance windows will lead to more different designs, with Ferrari the latest LMH machine to break cover at Fiorano this week

Photo by: Ferrari

From Monza we will have three LMH designs on the WEC grid and they’re all more or less distinct from one another. The Toyota GR010 HYBRID has more of an LMP1-look to it (and would surely be less maligned without such a corporate livery), the Glickenhaus-Pipo 007 LMH is decidedly retro, and now we have the out-there Peugeot. Ferrari appears to be keeping the trend going, though it’s difficult to tell courtesy of the camouflaging of the car on its roll-out this week.

So far, we have only seen one LMDh in its definitive skin, the Porsche 963, but it doesn’t bear much resemblance to the full-size model of the Cadillac, which is now going under the working title of Project GTP Hypercar. We’ve been assured by the General Motors brand that the real thing will end up not too dissimilar to this show car, in the same way that the 9X8 has remained true to the concept unveiled without a rear wing last summer.

The appearance of the new prototypes when they start racing will be more or less how they look when their careers come to an end: both LMH and LMDh are non-development formulae. The development storyline has been removed, while the creeping tentacles of the Balance of Performance have finally reached up and encircled the very pinnacle of sportscar racing. These moves are the price we have had to pay to get more manufacturers involved.

We now have 10 marques committed to either LMH or LMDh across the WEC and the IMSA SportsCar Championship in North America. So many manufacturers slugging out in the big sportscar races around the world is unprecedented.

This is sportscar racing’s big chance to attract a wider audience to a genuinely first-class product. Cars that look the part - and look different to each other - will surely be one way that can be achieved.

For me it’s not whether a Peugeot looks like a Peugeot or a Ferrari like a Ferrari. The most important thing is that they are identifiable as themselves beyond their paint jobs. So my message to the manufacturers still working on their cars is, here’s your chance to do something different.

My hope is that there are some eight-year-olds out there - and perhaps some 80-year-olds too - whose eyes opened wide when they saw pictures of the Peugeot 9X8 in the papers, online or wherever. And others in the future who will be similarly aghast when they see the Alpine or Lamborghini for the first time.

Maybe they will go on to become fully paid-up motor racing nuts just like me all those years ago when I saw the Tyrrell six-wheeler.

You can watch Peugeot's sportscar return in the 2022 Monza 6 Hours live on Motorsport.TV. Click here for more information.

Could Peugeot's radical approach serve to attract more fans to sportscar racing?

Photo by: Peugeot Sport