Rebellion to help Peugeot in WEC

Peugeot told us that it would reveal more details of its 2022-23 World Endurance Championship entry in the new year. It jumped the gun last week when it announced that it will be forging a relationship with top WEC privateer Rebellion Racing for its return to top-flight sportscar racing. But once again it didn’t go into detail.

The hypercar programme will be based out of PSA Motorsport headquarters in Versailles-satory in suburban Paris and “will be a single entity”, said group motorsport boss Jean-marc Finot. The “roles will be divided as a function of our respective competencies”, he explained.

Asked for elaboration on that, a PSA Motorsport spokeswoman said that the “partnership has not been defined yet”. She stressed that the new Peugeot hypercar would be “conceived and built” at Satory under the direction of PSA Motorsport technical director Olivier Jansonnie.

That appears to rule out a collaboration on the new car with French constructor ORECA, which developed Rebellion’s Gibson-powered R-13 and its previous LMP1 contender, the R-one, and now runs its WEC squad. It is still unclear whether ORECA may be involved in the running of the car in the same way it is with Toyota at present.

Details of Peugeot’s programme may be few and far between, but the new top class of the WEC does at least have an official name now. It will be called LM Hypercar, a move that was voted through by the FIA World Motor Sport Council last week.

The WMSC also decided that all cars for the new category must be affiliated to a car manufacturer. It was previously envisaged that independents could develop hypercars for the category that comes on stream for the 2020-21 season.