WM Peugeot P88 – 1988
Our final car on this list was designed with one purpose and one purpose alone, to be the fastest car ever down the Mulsanne Straight. Gerard Welter – a well-known madman when it came to designing racing cars – had been entering sportscar into the great race since the 1970s, with a little success, but just as little funding. For 1987 he and business partner Michel Meunier hatched a plot to make some headlines instead. Rather than win the race, the two Peugeot employees would instead build a car to be the first to hit 400km/h (249mph) at Le Mans. Starting with their P86 racing car, Welter and Meunier were handed some covert help from Peugeot, who liked the idea of the attempt, in the form of access to its wind tunnels – on Sundays when the manufacturer wasn’t using them. The result was the super-streamlined P88. A car so dedicated to aero efficiency that even the wing mirrors are enclosed to reduce drag. A 3.0-litre Peugeot engine was squeezed into the back, and with some nifty wizardry 910PS was extracted, along with a bonkers 1,020Nm (752lb ft) of torque. So important became this record attempt to Peugeot and the French organisers that a new radar system was installed to measure the speed – and then replaced mid-practice when it didn’t appear to be registering speeds properly. Come race day though, everything was set, and the P88 set out for its attempt. A few teething issues initially hampered it, but after hours of repairs driver Roger Dorchy finally did it, hitting a dizzying 407km/h (252mph). The car, having done its duty, duly overheated and retired, but the work was done. Later the number was changed to 405km/h to help Peugeot launch its new road car, but what did two km/h matter to Welter and Meunier?
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Le Mans images courtesy of Motorsport Images, 72MM image by Jochen Van Cauwenberge.