Memorable cars are what make sports car racing great. The 9X8 should be the most memorable in years.
PeugeotTwitterOn Friday, Peugeot revealed the final homologated version of the 9X8 prototype that it plans to race starting in July of this year. Months of testing and tweaking led to a product that looked slightly different from what was unveiled last year, but none of those changes go away from the original radical plan to build a modern race car without a rear wing. In fact, the design changes are certainly more unique, and arguably more radical, than what was already revealed.
We won’t know if the end product is actually fast until it shows up to race at Monza in a couple of months. In fact, the car’s delays from a timeline that could have allowed it to compete at Le Mans this year could suggest that it was a disappointment in at least its earliest tests. Even if it does not, it should be celebrated.
More than any other form of motorsport, sports car racing is about the cars. The reputation of Le Mans is built on the backs of them. The Mercedes 300 SL, the Ford GT, and the Ferrari 250 GTO are all directly tied to a Le Mans winner of the same family. Both individual performance cars and the brands that make them have built their reputations in sports car racing, and those reputations carry over to road cars to this day. The magic of the race is that it inspires these manufacturers to create unique things, to reimagine what it means to go fast and bring that technology over to their most exciting road cars.
Manufacturers took big swings as recently as the middle of last decade. Nissan sponsored the spectacular Deltawing, sure, but their biggest innovation was the car they built themselves with that program’s lead engineer, Ben Bowlby. The resulting GT-R LM was a front-wheel drive shot in the dark, and, while it was sunk by reliability concerns in its first race and never seriously developed from there, it was proof that manufacturers were still willing to get weird in pursuit of speed. Peugeot’s is the latest in that line, a sports car that breaks from over ten years of cars from every manufacturer looking quite a lot like the Audi R18 to do something very different.
The headline is that the 9X8 is racing without a rear wing. Two winglets on the car’s endplates make this a little less accurate a description than it was on the original concept, but the idea survives onto the final car. The end result of that design decision is the single most unique-looking prototype since the Deltawing. In photos, it looks just a little off. That makes it fascinating in the same way expressive art can be, like it’s a puzzle waiting to be unlocked. It definitely isn’t beautiful, but it looks decidedly good anyway. The company behind the 908, one of the most conventionally good-looking prototypes in recent history, has gone the other way entirely.
We’ll find out if the 9X8 has the makings of a competitive racer in July, but it’s already a success story in my book. The point of sports car racing is to push the boundaries in memorable ways, something the 9X8 is a guarantee to do already. We should all be thankful that Peugeot was brave enough to try, and doubly thankful if they’re still interested in racing it here as a Dodge.
Keyword: The Absurd Peugeot 9X8 Is Why Sports Car Racing Exists