Peugeot commits to Le Mans hypercar
Peugeot will join the World Endurance Championship in 2022 with a Le Mans Hypercar. If you think you’ve read that before, you’d be right. It announced that back in November 2019, so what it effectively revealed on Friday ahead of the Le Mans 24 Hours is that it is sticking to its original plan and won’t be going down the LMDH route.
The French manufacturer never wavered in its commitment to returning to the top flight of sportscar racing the year after next, only in how it was going to do it. It opted to review its plans after the announcement in January of the new Lmp2-based LMDH class that offered a cheaper way for Peugeot to get back on the Le Mans 24 Hours grid for the first time since 2011.
Now it has settled on building an LMH hybrid prototype and there are multiple reasons for this decision, according to Jean-marc Finot, motorsport boss of Peugeot parent company, the PSA group.
Building an LMH prototype will allow the car to incorporate more Peugeot DNA than a machine developed around an off-the-shelf LMP2 machine. The marque can produce its own chassis and incorporate much more than just styling cues into the aerodynamics.
“We think building our own tub gives us more legitimacy when we are fighting other big manufacturers,” explained Finot.
“It is important to have all the DNA of Peugeot Sport in our racing car. With LMH there is more design and aerodynamic freedom for our designers. We can put the design of the Peugeot brand into our car.”
The LMDH rules call for spec rear-axle hybrid, whereas LMH allows for an energy-retrieval system at the front. This, Finot pointed out, is in line with a new range of performance models planned by the manufacturer under the Peugeot Sport Engineered tagline.
What Peugeot hasn’t told us is when the car will race for the first time during the course of 2022. Its stance remains that it will give a debut to its new prototype, for which it has yet to announce a name, some time over the course of that season’s WEC. “Our position is the same as before,” said Finot. “Because the car will be [homologated] for five years, we need to be sure of our design.”
Finot did reveal that the programme is facing delays, though he stressed that this was only down to the COVID-19 crisis and unrelated to its decision to evaluate the LMDH rules. This means that the first tests of the car have been put back from the middle of next year to some time nearer its end.
Asked if the car could be up and
running by the beginning of the autumn, Finot said: “For September we will have to fight, but it will be before the end of 2021”.
The major technical decisions in the development of the car have already been made under the leadership of Peugeot Sport technical director Olivier Jansonnie. These include the configuration of the engine, which Finot declined to reveal. Key technical suppliers, which include Ligier Automotive for the aerodynamics, have already been appointed. Finot revealed that Total, Peugeot’s lubricant partner for the past 25 years, could produce the battery via its Saft offshoot.
Peugeot will begin thinking about drivers for the cars fielded by the in-house Peugeot Sport team imminently, according to Finot. He insisted that it will not be essential for Peugeot to have multiple French drivers on its books. “We know it will be very difficult to fight in the WEC, so we will focus on performance,” he said. “The priority is performance: if they are French, good, but we will not chose drivers because of their nationality.”