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| A seriously engineered package |
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Until last week there were actually two 20Cups, but the white one came to grief at the hands of a French journalist. The black one, however, is fit and well, with creator Jean-Christophe Bolle-Reddat less edgy about letting me have a go than he was when I drove his last creation, that 907.
The V12 was the last Peugeot concept to emerge from the company's old design centre at La Garenne, Paris, and the 20Cup is the first fruit of the new studio at Vélizy. The studio building is shared with Citroen, but there's a Berlin Wall between the two companies' areas. They even create their styling models differently; Peugeot with high-density expanded polystyrene, Citroen with clay.
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| Cup is actually front-wheel drive |
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The 20Cup has progressed well beyond the polystyrene stage, though. Like the 907, it's built around a carbonfibre tub and features racecar-like fabricated double-wishbone front suspension and coil-over dampers. At the back, however, is a giant wheel braked by a dinky little disc and shod with a wide, wide tyre intended for the Le Mans prototype class, and a motorbike-like double swinging arm controlled by a single Ohlins coil-over. The carapace-like bonnet/front wings/bodyside assembly is designed to generate downforce over the front wheels, with air ducted out either side of the cockpit below the stylised lions' heads.
And now I'm going to drive this mad mutant, this tricycle-car whose genetic code terminated so abruptly just behind the driver. It's raining and there are neither windscreen wipers nor, unless you count an inch-high tab of polycarbonate, a windscreen. Helmet on, then.
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