Here's a Chance to Buy the Oddest Racing Car Ever: Peugeot's 806 Procar

This is the discussion thread for a recent post on GTPlanet:

This article was published by Andrew Evans (@Famine) on October 26th, 2020 in the Car Culture category.

 

Awesome stuff!!!! Good ol’ times of Super Touring...

 

When you take the GT2 Racing Modification a little bit too far...

This is just funny:

 

Got to nitpick a few things in the article...

As far as I'm aware, the project was initiated by the marketing team, not only to make a splash (which people still remember 25 years later), but also to show how well the 806 drove and handled compared to the rather stodgy image of most MPVs at the time.

There are plenty of other MPVs that have raced - multiple generations of Opel Zafira have competed in the VLN and/or the Nurburgring 24 Hours, Honda ran an Odyssey up Pikes Peak, and, while much smaller, the Kia Venga is a popular entry in the Green Hybrid Cup. The 806 is the most famous, but it's far from the only one that has been raced.

This one has a lot of caveats - the 504 was already homologated and rallying in Group 4 long before Group B was a thing, and the pickup would normally have been grandfathered into Group A but was instead pushed into Group B as it didn't meet the cabin space rules for Gr.A. Peugeot also entered it specifically into the notably gruelling Safari Rally, which the 504 had already won outright twice under Gr.4 regulations, primarily to promote how tough the 504 pickup was to its most important market, Africa. It's not as absurd as it sounds, especially as they managed to finish 5th in class and 8th overall, just ahead of a Nissan pickup.

 

I have very limited track driving experience, 4 times 15 minutes on Hockenheim GP (in 4 separate years, 2003-2007) and 2 laps of the Nordschleife (2005) but funnily enough my very first 15 minutes were on a wet Hockenheimring in a Zafira 2.2 turbodiesel. I even drifted it a little bit at the end of the session as I forgot that I was supposed to go to the pit lane and had to turn in a bit hastily and avoid getting on the start/finish straight Just to add to that, next year I returned with a Ford Focus C-Max 2.0 turbodiesel (both the Zafira and the C-Max were rentals).

 

Ignoring the fact that, yes, Pikes Peak very much is a race, the exact same Odyssey pez is referring to has taken part in races with other cars, too:

 

A race is a race, isn't it? Its own organisers refer to it as a race all over their site: https://ppihc.org/about-competitors/

I'm not sure why it's such a semantical issue though. Either way the observations pez made were right.

 

So a race isn't a race, got it.

 

When you have to bring the kids to school but it turns out it's a driving school. The first thing that came to mind for me was the Renault Espace F1 but that's not really anything like this.

 

Which makes it a race against the clock... moreover, ever heard about the "Race to the Clouds"?

 

Here’s a question, did the Renault Espace F1 ever race competitively?

I’m assuming no but in a parallel universe somewhere maybe it did?

 

I wasn't going to respond to this thread again as clearly my comments were very unwelcome, but I'm going to have to defend myself here.

Describing something as 'the one X that Y' is very much saying that there are no others that satisfy that criteria, that's the purpose of the word 'the' in that phrase. If the sentence had simply read 'one X that Y', then that's a different meaning.

Just to recap, the specific wording was 'the one racing MPV that actually raced'. If what you meant was that it's one of several that actually raced, or that it's simply a racing MPV that actually raced, then fair enough, I retract my comment. It isn't however particularly fair to have a crack at me for reading the definite article as specifying a single or unique item, because that's the very meaning of the word.

 

Now that is a good reason to buy an MPV! This particular Eurovan generation is so versatile in terms of cabin space, you can turn it into a bedroom or meeting room if you want, an the car itself does not take too much space.

 

I just love when they use an odd choice as a race car.
Everyone can make a GT-R, M3, those kinds of cars into race cars.
It takes some skills turning a minivan into a race car.

 

I keep driving past a 806 rotting in someone's drive and always thought hmm maybe I should get that and turn it into this 806 Procar

 

For a publicity stunt if that's what it was, it was a success as it certainly stood out. Seeing as it was effectively a Class 2 Super Tourer, (with Procar Division 2 regs as close as anyway), would have been interesting to see it race elsewhere too, regionally against other Super Tourers of the time, totally outclassed sure but still. Granted as per the article, much of it was a Class 2 405 Mi16 underneath, and the engine was a mix of 405 ST cylinder head and the block from an F2 306 Maxi if memory serves me?

If it was to be bought and taken to the track again, you can imagine more than a few flummoxed faces if they saw an 806 Procar fly past . In a similar vein of unusual race cars, it reminds me the late Fabio Danti's Super Touring-esque Skoda Octavia Wagon he used for HillClimbing.

 

It is great to see something different racing, but i don't think that a minivan is necessarily any harder to turn into a super touring-spec race car then anything else would be. Weight and aerodynamics would be the only real downsides to such a venture.

 

What's next, Renault Magnums as rally cars?

 

Peugeot Belgique's mad creation is for sale ? Count me in. Those damn Belgians.

 

Wow.