[Video] We're still in love with Peugeot's last LMP1 car | GRR
If you're a racing driver, every now and then someone comes along and asks you if you fancy a go in their old racing car. Sometimes it's something quite humble, but from time to time it's pretty special – like the last LMP1 car Peugeot ever built.
Such is the horrible situation that Le Mans LMP2 winner, and Goodwood regular, Richard Bradley found himself in last year, when someone asked him to have a go in a Peugeot 908.
The 908, in case you didn't know, what the last car that Peugeot fielded at the top level of sportscar racing before the current 9X8. A diesel-engined machine with a 3.7-litre V8, it absolutely dominated the final season of the Intercontinetal Le Mans Cup – the precursor to the World Endurance Championship – winning six of the seven rounds. In fact the only race that it entered and didn't win was the big one, as Audi's first R18 defeated the 908 in one of the best Le Mans 24 Hours races ever in 2011.
Sadly that was it for the 908, as Peugeot pulled the plug on its sportscar project just before the 2012 WEC season began. But in recent years these non-hybrid sportscars have begun to pop up at more and more historic racing events, much to our delight.
Here we find Bradley touring the awesome climbs and sweeps of Portimao in the Portuguese Algarve. And thanks to the race data logger fitted to the Peugeot we can see just how hard an LMP1 car can be driven around one of the World's great modern circuits.
At one point, during one of the two compressive left handers around the top of the circuit, Bradley's G-meter reads 2.5, which is mental, but which the 908 makes look supremely easy.