Le Mans at 8am: Top Gear in the Peugeot 908 with Nicolas Minassian

Le Mans. 8am. Peugeot’s 908 - the quickest endurance racer ever built - is being readied for a hot lap. Two blokes are attempting to shoehorn Top Gear into the passenger seat. Oh Lord.

“Can you feel it through your arse? Can you feel it through your arse?”

This, then, is how I’m going to die: sealed inside a tiny carbon-fibre coffin while a crazed Frenchman urgently quizzes the sensitivity of my backside. A crazed Frenchman with a Cockney lilt and 700bhp pinned beneath his right foot. A crazed Frenchman who looks fully committed to firing both of us - plus a near-priceless, championship-winning racing car - straight into a slab of unbending Armco.

This feature was first published in Issue 205 of Top Gear magazine (2010)

**Images:* John Wycherley*

Le Mans at 8am: the 908 on a hot lap

And, for the record, yes - I can feel it through my arse. On a brutally cold morning in northern France, we spear into Raccordement, the rapid right-hander leading onto the Le Mans start–finish straight, at a speed that feels incompatible with physics. The crazed Frenchman is leaning hard on the tyres, sawing the wheel left and right, delicately holding the car right on the knife-edge of adhesion.

His earlier warning - delivered less than 10 minutes ago - now hangs in the air like a curse. “You don’t get much warning when it’s going to go,” he said. “The weight is way back and you’re at the front. It slides a bit and then ‘wham!’, you’re in the wall.”

Ah.

Nicolas Minassian, Top Gear, and Peugeot’s 908

The Frenchman with the Cockney twang is Nicolas Minassian, Peugeot’s factory Le Mans driver. (He’s been living in Goodwood for the past decade, which goes a long way towards explaining that unmistakably British edge to his accent.) The 700bhp - and, arguably more importantly, nearly 1,356Nm (1,000lb ft) of torque - is currently being stamped out by the 5.5-litre V12 diesel sitting in Peugeot’s 908, the car that took victory at Le Mans last year.

This is the fastest endurance racer in history: the machine that ended a decade of Audi dominance and triggered a bout of Gallic partying not witnessed since the storming of the Bastille.

Nic didn’t feature in the victorious #9 crew last year - a string of mechanical troubles left his #7 Peugeot sixth overall - but Minassian still produced the quickest lap of the race, circulating at an average 240km/h (149mph), which was two seconds faster than the best lap managed by the winning car. In other words, he’s rapid. Peugeot’s technical director, Christophe Besse, tells me later that our best flying lap is within a second of Nic’s quickest solo effort, despite the substantial Top Gear ballast strapped into the passenger seat.

Down the start–finish straight at full chat

Back in the coffin again. We punch out onto the start–finish straight, and the way the 908 piles on speed is beyond belief. Each upshift is savage and abrupt; there’s barely a second in any gear - a chunk of solid, shocking acceleration, then another, then another.

Now there’s noise, but not the usual bark from pistons and exhaust. Instead, it’s a violent, suctioning, air-pummelling soundtrack - turbo whoosh and wind buffetting, like the atmosphere itself is being bullied aside. We flash past empty grandstands as the speed climbs towards 322km/h (200mph), and I try to picture this at 4am: three hours into a punishing night stint, rain spattering the screen, lights strobing in the cockpit, slicing through streams of slower traffic.

I can’t picture it.

It’s tempting to think of endurance racing - particularly diesel endurance racing, lacking the skull-splitting roar - as something that rewards dependability more than living on the limit. That’s nonsense. The 908 is a monster.

“It feels a lot like an F1 car,” says Nic, who has tested for Honda and Williams in the past. “A little bit lazier to change direction, but that’s all. In some ways, it’s tougher, because all the power is from 2,500-4,200rpm. All the torque arrives at once, so it’s more difficult to modulate the throttle. In the wet, we tend to long-shift because there’s less power at the top of the rev band. You drive with your arse.”

There it is again: the arse. You’d want a properly resilient one to drive this thing. Last year’s winning 908 covered 5,031km (3,126 miles) during the 24-hour race - several hundred miles more than a coast-to-coast drive across the USA - at an average of 217km/h (135mph). Half a dozen laps as a passenger is intense enough. Eight hours of flat-out, sleep-deprived driving must tilt your mind a little off-centre.

At the end of the straight, we hurl ourselves into the opening right-hander of the Dunlop Curves at least 190km/h (120mph) faster than I would ever choose. I have never felt so convinced that death is imminent. The g-force is brutal, pinning my helmet into the window, and yet the 908 just clings on.

We pass beneath the Dunlop bridge and I can hear Nic laughing. Endurance racing clearly does odd things to people.

Getting into the 908 cockpit

But the grip and the lateral g aren’t the 908’s most reality-bending party trick. For that, we need to wind back 20 minutes, when the 908 is idling in the pit lane with Top Gear jammed into the passenger seat. Actually, wind back nearer 28 minutes, to the farce of simply getting into it.

It isn’t straightforward. What Peugeot describes as a ‘two-part passenger door’ is what even the most upbeat estate agent would call a ‘very small window’. Clambering in is basically a stationary - and even less entertaining - take on that terrible TV show Hole in the Wall.

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Once you’ve made it inside, it’s… snug. LMP1 cars are required by the rules to be two-seaters, but nowhere does it say the second seat must accommodate a full-sized adult human. The cockpit narrows around the driver’s feet. To stop me accidentally nudging the pedals and sending us into a diesel-fuelled accident, Peugeot’s engineers have literally fixed a plank to the left of the brake pedal to keep our legs apart.

The cockpit’s focal point is the steering wheel, covered in buttons. “it’s more complicated than an F1 wheel,” says Nic, with a faint but unmistakable note of pride. He tweaks a couple of dials, pulls the right-hand paddle and…

Torque: what the 908 does to your body

Whump. If you want a neat lesson in what pure, concentrated torque feels like, the method is simple: strap yourself into the Peugeot 908 Le Mans racer and ask Nic Minassian to launch it from a standstill to a modest 80km/h (50mph) along the pit lane.

The sensation is ridiculous - somewhere between teleportation and being struck in the small of your back by a runaway lorry. There’s no waiting for boost to build; there’s just a couple of seconds - if that - of unstoppable, mass-ignoring forward motion. You know that feeling when you crest a hump-backed bridge at a decent lick and your stomach momentarily lags behind? Now imagine leaving behind not only your stomach but the rest of your essential organs, your brain, your limbs… in fact your entire physical self - while the car flings you about 46 metres (50 yards) down the road. If this sounds mildly hallucinatory, that’s because it is. Peugeot has engineered a psychedelic torque monster.

It could also be the last of its type. The 908 will tackle this year’s Le Mans 24 Hours in broadly the same specification as the 2009 car, but the LMP1 regulations are due a complete rewrite in 2011, intended to level the petrol and diesel playing field. Diesel engines will be cut from 5.5 litres to 3.7, and fuel tanks from 85 litres to 61. The 908 will be finished. Peugeot will have to create an all-new car.

It’s expected to run near the front, of course, but the feeling within the team is that the replacement won’t be able to match the 908 for outright speed.

So this year’s 24 Hours of Le Mans may be the final flourish of Le Mans’s glorious diesel age. Will the 908 secure its place in history as the fastest car ever to win this endurance race? Or will Audi’s might return to crush it without mercy? Finding out will be a blast. June 12. Go. Watch it. Feel it. Through your arse.