The Peugeot 908 V12 HDi DPFS

October Over the years, we’ve often had emails from technology fans asking what motorsport has to do with our primarily advanced technology menu and our response is always that new technology is not just about doing it different but doing it better. Motorsport is different – motorsport requires doing it best. That means that you won’t even be competitive unless you have world’s best practice or thereabouts in every single aspect of a race team, let alone the design of the car and the quality of driver. So when one of the world’s top manufacturers sets out with a goal of starting from scratch and winning a world class event, we figure that’s a smorgasbord of fascinating technologies and organization worth exploring. In June 2005, Peugeot announced its decision to accept a new technological challenge: to win one of the world’s most prestigious and demanding motor races, the Le Mans 24 Hours, with a car powered by an HDi diesel engine equipped with a diesel particulate filter system (DPFS). This week, the company unveiled the race car and a lot of the details.

This legendary race will provide Peugeot with an opportunity to express fully the values enshrined in its philosophy: excellence, demonstrated by the choice of endurance coupled with reliability, dynamism, emphasised by a team challenge based on performance, looks, illustrated by the car’s feline profile, and lastly innovation, expressed amongst other ways through the use of technology designed to protect the environment.

The car that will display the Peugeot colours in the Le Mans 24 Hours race and in the “Le Mans Series” in 2007 will be the Peugeot 908. The choice of number comes from, “90” designating an exceptional Peugeot model and 8 the next number in sequence after the 907 concept car.

The choice of body style is that of a closed car, in line with changes to the regulations announced by the Automobile Club de l’Ouest on 16 June 2006. Equally there was also a desire to keep a link with the two-times winner of the Le Mans 24 Hours in 1992 and 1993, the Peugeot 905.

While from a technical point of view this solution presents a number of drawbacks (weight, height of the centre of gravity, operational problems), the Peugeot Sport team felt that it also offers advantages, particularly in terms of chassis rigidity and aerodynamics.

Monocoque body:

The monocoque body of the 908 is made of carbon fibre and is a truly closed structure, compared to the 905, which was a “racing car” with a detachable tubular rollover bar. This type of structure offers strong natural rigidity (the “eggshell” effect) and allows the weight of the monocoque body to be optimised.

Created from scratch at the beginning of 2006, Peugeot Sport’s aerodynamics department had the difficult task of designing in just a few weeks an exterior body that was both original and aerodynamically efficient.

Three months after the appointment of the aerodynamics project team leader, a model of the car was undergoing its first tests in the wind tunnel. The car's overall shape results not only from the necessary compromise between aerodynamic efficiency and drag, but also the need to provide optimum airflow to the different radiators and intercoolers located within the generously dimensioned bodywork.

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