Peugeot learns from past Le Mans errors, as 9X8 Hypercar makes race debut

The Hypercar era of the WEC has got off to something of a slow start since its commencement last year. From a manufacturer perspective. Toyota has been the lone big name for some time now, (discounting the Alpine, which is just a very long in the tooth LMP1) and though the efforts of Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus are to be applauded, Jim Glickenhaus and his team running the SCG007 are only ever going to be a plucky underdog. Yes, there is BoP, but the reality is that Toyota has been running in WEC for a decade and is a full-bore works effort; it would have had to trip up severely for SCG to be in with a chance at Le Mans.

However, this weekend at Monza, Peugeot re-joins the fray with its much-anticipated 9X8, the wingless wonder from Magny-Cours. Its arrival heralds the start of a potential golden era across the WEC and IMSA, with Ferrari also joining the LMH ranks next year, along with a bevy of IMSA based LMDhs.

In its last Le Mans era, Peugeot was often undone by operational hiccups

The original plan was for the French team to be at Le Mans this year but, put simply, the car wasn’t ready. A seemingly endless litany of supply chain issues, coupled with the lockdowns of the past couple of years, have not made life easy for those wanting to build road cars let alone race cars, and Peugeot has been no exception.

To turn up at Le Mans it would have had to run at the Spa 6 Hours and homologated the 9X8 in April, something it wasn’t in a position to do. The car first hit the track at the very end of 2021, a mere seven months ago, a short gestation period for any car and particularly an endurance racer. Expecting it to make its debut in a six-hour race a mere four months later was unrealistic and would have locked Peugeot into fixing its design sooner that it would have liked.

When Porsche or Audi were last running at Le Mans, multiple 30-hour tests would be completed, putting the cars though a simulation of a race, practice and qualifying, Toyota still runs such tests. With the benefit of hindsight, there was no way Peugeot was going to be able to make a serious showing at Le Mans this year. Talking to technical director Oliver Jansonnie at the race, he confirmed that the team was still to complete a trouble free six-hour test, let alone 24-hours plus.

“We have run more than 11,000km, which sounds a lot, but realistically when you want to troubleshoot a car like this, it is not much. We want to run more, but we are trying to do it at the right rhythm for us,” explained Jansonnie. The pre-Monza plan was to conduct back-to-back six-hour tests, with each team (Peugeot is entering two cars) running a six-hour stint. Jansonnie also made the important point that running tests is one thing, but time needs to be taken to address findings from those tests, be they reliability or performance issues.