Peugeot shows off the world’s most advanced racer

This hybrid race car is an important test platform for the technology, if it can make it at La sarthe, it can make it on normal roads

Forget Formula One cars or any other race car for that matter, this Peugeot 908 Hybrid race car really is the business.

Powered by a high-tech diesel race engine, an electric motor to supplement the already torquey engine and fitted with a kinetic energy recovery system (KERS), that’s tight the same gizmo being tested for Formula One right now.

The combination of three cutting edge motive technology on a single competition platform is beyond what the other manufacturers are thinking right now.

This car is so far out of the box Peugeot is still waiting to see of the race organisers will allow it to take part in the Le Mans Series next year.

Apart from the high performance diesel motor, this race car relies on a 60kW gear-driven electric motor which does double duty as starter motor, 600 lithium-ion cells packed into 10 battery packs and an advanced thyristor controller and converter to manage the flow of energy between the batteries and motor.

Just like any other self-respecting hybrid car, this racer can be powered by the diesel, or electric motor or a combination of both.

Peugeot claims that the KERS technology, which recovers otherwise wasted kinetic energy and converts them into a 20 second power booster that adds a whoppign 80 horsepower to the car, without using anything more than braking energy.

All those extra electronic horses are also suppose tohelp reduce diesel thirst between three and five per cent.

“This hybrid 908 HDi FAP is in perfect keeping with the overall mission of our endurance racing programme which covers not only the challenge of competing, of course, but also the fact that as a car manufacturer we can use motor sport as a research and development tool for the Peugeot brand as a whole,” says Peugeot Sport’s Director, Michel Barge.

“After innovating through the use of our HDi FAP technology in competition, running a hybrid car in endurance racing would give Peugeot a chance to gain extremely valuable experience that would benefit the development of production cars. Whether we use this technology or not in 2009 will obviously depend on the details of the new regulations published by the Automobile Club de l’Ouest,” he added.