MY LIFE WITH THE PEUGEOT 905

During the 1990 German Grand Prix, I bumped into Keke Rosberg, whom I had known for several years – we had worked together during our Fittipaldi and McLaren days in Formula 1. Keke had been hired by Peugeot to drive the new 905 Group C sportscar but, as he confided to me, it was a bit of a disaster and was in need of some serious engineering input. Would I be interested in going to help out with the project?

At the time I was Gerhard Berger’s race engineer at McLaren and was coming to the end of a seven-year period with the team. Was this the itch I needed – to immerse myself in a different project? Unfortunately, about a year or so earlier, I had been to see Ron Dennis about the engineers having proper signed contracts, to which he agreed. Therefore, having made the decision to leave the team and join Peugeot, I had to relay this information to Ron, who prided himself in keeping key members of the team together and happy. He was more than upset and, to prove the point, had his lawyers come up with a solution that basically cost me about a month’s wages.

There then followed a couple of interviews with Jean Todt, the boss of Peugeot Talbot Sport, during which he outlined his plan for the team and what he expected my role to be. There were to be two cars entered into the 1991 Sportscar World Championship, with me engineering the one driven by Keke and Yannick Dalmas (another ex-F1 driver), and Jean-Claude Vaucard engineering the second car, driven by Philippe Alliot and Mauro Baldi. Andre de Cortanze was the tech director.

The workshop at Velizy on the outskirts of Paris was one enormous factory unit, housing