FIRST LOOK: Peugeot 9X8 - 600HP Hybrid Hypercar With No Rear Wing | Top Gear

Welcome foreigner to Japan It has an amazing car culture Some of the friendliest humans on Earth It has the best vending machines which is really helpful when you're really jetlagged Helpful robots There's even a racing circuit at the base of Mount Fuji We're here to see a new racing series and one very special racing car in particular and it's this the 9x8 this is Peugeot's new Le Mans

hypercar

it has a 2.6 liter turbo V6 and an all-wheel drive

hybrid

system. four-wheel drive has 671 brake horsepower and weighs just over a ton, so yeah, this is a pretty serious car now.

The LeMans

hypercar

and its sister series, the Daytona lemon

hybrid

s, are a new endurance racing series that has been conceived to be a little more realistic at least in terms of budgets and Replacing the very expensive lmp1 class is something of a start of a new era for the World Endurance Championship and I think it is worth paying attention to. Yeah, so what's so good about it? Well, it's cheaper than before, so that should encourage more teams. and more variety, which is always good in the competition so far, along with the lemon-colored Daytona hybrids, there are entries from Peugeot, BMW, the house of Glicken, Alpine, Ferrari, Toyota and Porsche, among others.

This is good, but after that the rules are a little looser, so each team has to use them. a specific chassis from one of the four manufacturers that keeps costs down, but they can then use any internal combustion engine they want, giving them a lot of freedom in how they power their car when allied to a hybrid engine. Use it to drive the front wheels to give full drive to the

rear

wheels or you can simply use the motor to drive the

rear

wheels on its own, what that means is that the cars will have a lot more character they sound different, they will

look

different on the track and therefore you will get more variety, and this balance of power regulations to keep the races close and fair and ensure that one team does not whitewash the entire series, there is a Michelin tire supplier and up and running. a couple of hypercars will be 75 cheaper than lmp1 which means you will have private teams that will be able to match them with the big manufacturers and you will also get cars that

look

like they were designed by real people rather than a copy. and paste racing cars with different liveries and that's why we're interested in Peugeot's effort because regulations limiting Aero drops means designers can be more creative and Peugeot has decided it can produce all the ground effect it wants. needs using smart Aero bass and without the majestic rear spoiler and that makes the 9x8 look different abroad, just look at it, if attractive cars are fast then this will be lightning and the basic structure is really interesting so here we have a 200 kilowatt electric. engine wrapped in a nose that actually looks like someone at Peugeot designed it well, so it's not exactly a 308, but you do see the family resemblance and then as you go down the car, come with me and look at this, there's the cabin, which is a little bit wider than I

first

thought when I saw it in the photos, although the car appears to be very low and narrow, it has a very Slinky shape and as you go down you see all the parts Aero and then when you get to the rear, there's no huge rear

wing

. what we are used to with these types of racing cars because the downforce requirement is a little less on the Leman advertising car.

Peugeot has gone in a completely different direction, they have managed the airflow throughout the top of the car and especially underneath it. for this car to produce enough downforce without a Big Wang and also as you'll notice it still has Peugeot taillights, it's not a 508 but you know what I mean, it looks great which is kind of a benchmark for Racing. The manufacturers have more competitive flair and character for the fans, a win in every sense, but they still have work to do, which is why we're here at Fuji for six hours with Peugeot to check on some of their final testing ahead of the big campaign in 2023. .You are now the boss of stalantis Motorsport, why do Motorsport?

Why race cars? Because it is difficult to play with a Peugeot 308 that you have there, it is not exactly like that, but if you do Motorsport it is because it is a passion, I mean The interesting thing is that here you started a completely new series of lemon hypercar, yes, it is very different So what do they have in Hype Car that will excite fans? What is the difference with LMP1? Oh, what's different from LMP one? I would say. the main difference is the cost to make this program affordable, so creating such a programmer, of course, is a business decision, it is doing it, it is a technical laboratory for new technologies, the skills that we are developing, the tools, then, we are already using in architecture. the same as the five white PLCs on the track PC and the power management algorithm that was developed in the 1960s directly related, yes, so this year has been a kind of installation, a little test year and then next year you'll be You're going to hit it hard and you have a car that looks very different from other lemon hypercars.

Why did you do it without big

wing

s? Why doesn't an nmp one look like? Yes, you are right, although this year is a learning here, but since we are racers every time we come, even if we are racing, we do it, so we will do our best, the sports regulation is forcing a geometry of the car, yes, in this car, it's a downforce coefficient, a drug coefficient, as long as you're in this window, yes, you can make whatever design you want or we make the bed instead of letting the Motorsport engineer design the car and then , the design style department, to make it beautiful, we went into a road legal car, what we call a convergence design, yes, and technically the way we've worked is that we were in the framework to meet regulation, without compromising performance, yes, but with a lot of room for creativity in the design and beautiful racing cars, fast racing cars, yes, if that's it. beautiful must be fast it is necessary to win it is necessary to be beautiful I'm James roster and I'm a Peugeot Sports racing driver in the 9x8 for the World Endurance Championship so lmh gives you a lot more freedom in the rules in terms of designing so you can design a beautiful car, you can have areas of the car where you can create your unique identity, but you can also implement your technology so that you can actually build a car that has your philosophy, the ethics of your team, and really build the project.

Around the type of guidelines you want to show for your brand, four-wheel drive is different for me. I've never heard of racing a four-wheel drive car. This is something that's really unique to the hypercar class and when you go out. corners and that four wheel drive kicks in, it's an incredible feeling, the car just flies out of the corners, you can be on the edge of the limit of the car when you enter the corner and then you get to the exit and you hit the gas and the thing flies straight out of the corners and this is something that's really unique to the hypercar class, the car helps drive, okay, it's quite intuitive, which becomes really challenging if you have a There are a lot of GT cars and the You overtake every six or eight laps, so you have to be very smart with traffic management and energy management.

You can't just fly behind one of the GT cars and expect it to move. because he himself is racing at full speed, so you have to be smart, you have to play a kind of chess game with those GT cars and you are also racing with the other hypercars, so from that side it takes a lot of concentration to run. In the hypercar class, we obviously have regeneration on the front axle with our electric motor, so we recover 200 kilowatts of energy during braking from the front axle, which allows us to return the energy to the battery to then deploy it in the Departures. and what becomes unique is that it affects the temperature of the brakes, so it affects the heating of the brakes, it affects when the battery is at 100, you don't have it, so you have to manage the state of charge of the battery , the sock you may hear us referring to. through the radio is the state of charge and this is very important to always keep it in the correct window to keep the battery temperature in the correct window, so there are a lot of things to handle technically from the engineering side as well with everything The brands that are coming now in the next few years will be incredible.

The hypercar class. There are so many brands that will be very competitive and each will be able to show off their unique technology, so I think it will be a great future for hypercars. What we are wondering is if this 9x8 is really good or if it is all mouth and no pants, and to understand it well, this is what Peugeots really look like Peugeots when they go out to compete and simple things like having lights that are recognizable from a distance even during the day they make the 9x8 really easy to distinguish, but you also notice that the 9x8 sounds different from the Toyota gr-010 and looks like a different class, completely smaller, more agile, somehow more elegant than the more Japanese entry traditional and very fast and that's the point, this is great.

Despite looking like a supermodel, 9x8 was defeated. Toyota won this race at Fuji, which is not unexpected given that Fuji is the home of the Toyota team, but Peugeot bought a car. it looked completely different and remained competitive after witnessing it. I think the lemon hypercars seem like a bit of a winner. Wait until next year when we have 10+ teams all trading paint on the same track. This could be the best thing that can happen. to endurance racing since then from 2023