In 1988, a Renegade Le Mans Team Broke The Record At The Mulsanne Straight

From Road & Track

You gotta admire the guys. Peugeot engineers Gerard Welter and Michel Meunier founded Welter Racing not to win at Le Mans through efficiency, fuel management, pit strategy, reliability, most laps and miles driven, and all that other weenie nerdy stuff, but to be the fastest damn car ever down the Mulsanne Straight.

That was it. That was the only goal. The Group C "Project 400" Peugeot WM 88 hit the grid in 36th place, and its sister car, the P87, dropped out of the race after just 22 laps-which was, hey, still an improvement over last year's entry, where it broke down after a mere 13 laps. P88 spent three and a half hours in the pits while its crew fixed an engine management problem. They were never going to win, but were they going to tackle the record?

Finally, Roger Dorchy went back out with the car. After a few laps, he was told to turn up the boost.

He blasted down all 3.7 miles of the rough, un-chicaned, knuckle-whitening Mulsanne Straight at 400 kph-248 miles per hour-for a few laps before he gunned it to the top: 407kph, or 252mph.

Shortly thereafter, the P88 broke down from any combination of electrical, cooling, and turbocharging problems.

The most astounding part: Welter and Peugeot agreed to advertise the record at 405 kilometers per hour, simply to coincide with the debut of the new 405. The record having already been smashed, what was a few extra kilometers off the top?

That year, the Silk Cut Jaguar XJR-9 ended Porsche's seven-year dominance at Le Mans. Mazda was still three years away from winning the entire thing, but tried nonetheless with the three-rotor 757. But Peugeot's record still stands. Two years after the record, the chicanes were put up to prevent exactly this sort of thing from happening again, so Welter Racing's record-setting run down a public highway is a perfect little time capsule, never to be challenged again.

The French invented motor racing, after all; why shouldn't it be a surprise that they've defended their home turf? After all, the video above shows just that: just a sleepy little village, a few quiet houses, and the siren of a wailing turbocharged V6, a mile away but still as loud as a hip-hop siren.