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

The race didn’t quite go to the same plan, as the 806 experienced brake problems (go on, act shocked) and then engine failure.
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Got to nitpick a few things in the article...

Peugeot chose, for reasons still best known only to Peugeot, the 806 people carrier as the basis for a race car.
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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’s no price available, so you’ll just have to make your own queries if you fancy picking up the one racing MPV that actually raced.
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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.

After all, it once entered a pickup truck in Group B rally, so why not?
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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.
 
pez2k
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.
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Yes, I could definitely have speculated those things in the article too. But I didn't - the reasons are still, as I said, best known to Peugeot (after all, who would know better?).
pez2k
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.
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Pikes Peak is a time trial, not a race. Zafira and Venga are in different classes of car-based MPVs (Astra and i20/Soul respectively) rather than minivans.

People have raced minivans/MPVs in Le Mons, and in drag racing, and I'm pretty sure I've seen an Odyssey in some domestic US series too.
pez2k
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.
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Yes, I know.
 
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pez2k
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,
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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).
 
Famine
Yes, I could definitely have speculated those things in the article too. But I didn't - the reasons are still, as I said, best known to Peugeot (after all, who would know better?).

Pikes Peak is a time trial, not a race. Zafira and Venga are in different classes of car-based MPVs (Astra and i20/Soul respectively) rather than minivans.

People have raced minivans/MPVs in Le Mons, and in drag racing, and I'm pretty sure I've seen an Odyssey in some domestic US series too.

Yes, I know.
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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:
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TheAdmiester
Ignoring the fact that, yes, Pikes Peak very much is a race
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It's a time trial - specifically a Hill Climb. The competitors are against the clock and place on a timed leaderboard, not against other cars on a position leaderboard.
TheAdmiester
the exact same Odyssey pez is referring to has taken part in races with other cars, too
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Famine
I'm pretty sure I've seen an Odyssey in some domestic US series too.
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TheAdmiester
A race is a race, isn't it?
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No.
TheAdmiester
Its own organisers refer to it as a race all over their site: https://ppihc.org/about-competitors/
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And also as a timed hill climb, which is what it is. It is against a clock, not against other cars.
TheAdmiester
I'm not sure why it's such a semantical issue though. Either way the observations pez made were right.
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Semantics are important; it's literally the meaning of words. How one uses words is... the basis of communication. I mean, this has arisen because someone read "the one" as "the only"...

... and all three of the "nitpicks" are either incorrect or superfluous. Nobody knows better than Peugeot what the reasons were for the 806, I didn't say the 806 was the only minivan to ever race in anything ever, and the extra information on the 504 Group B was not only known to me (as you'll spot from my own Goodwood article from 2018, which I linked) but simply not a necessary addition to this article.

I'm happy to accept corrections on any article, but at the moment I have none to make, so I don't really know quite what this discussion is about.


But hey, we did manage a whole four posts on the vehicle the article is actually about. Which is nice.
 
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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.
 
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?
 
Razamataz
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?
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No, it did demonstration runs only - at F1 events to my recollection.
 
Famine
Semantics are important; it's literally the meaning of words. How one uses words is... the basis of communication. I mean, this has arisen because someone read "the one" as "the only"...
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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.
 
pez2k
I wasn't going to respond to this thread again as clearly my comments were very unwelcome
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Not at all. As I commented earlier, we'll happily take corrections on articles - but none are warranted here. Of your three "nitpicks" one was information I chose not to speculate on, and one was information I chose not to include (as it wasn't about that car). Had you said "Here's some extra info", I'd probably not have responded.
pez2k
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.
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That's certainly the one interpretation that you could make. It's not the only interpretation that you could make.
 
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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.
 
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 :lol:. 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.
 
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Aiado
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.
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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.
 
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