PEUGEOT 9X8 Hybrid Hypercar: from the virtual world to the racetrack

Turning heads on and off the track, the PEUGEOT 9X8 represents what’s truly possible when you’re empowered to think outside the box.

Flexible racing rules and a digital-first approach gave Peugeot Sport’s engineers a unique opportunity to strike a new balance between performance and style, particularly as they could test and verify every design idea in the virtual world first. This liberal creative process led to them focusing on smart aerodynamics, resulting in the 9X8’s striking design and unique, sleek silhouette.

Before so much as a single component of the 9X8 was physically made, the entire car was tested virtually using SIMULIA in the 3DEXPERIENCE® platform on the cloud. Engineers harnessed SIMULIA’s sophisticated design and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation capabilities to fine-tune their ideas and define the car’s major characteristics.

“Typically, when you design a racecar, there is no compromise between performance and style,” said Olivier Jansonnie, technical director at Peugeot Sport. “The 9X8 is a careful balance between engineering and design, creativity and technical know-how, largely due to the power and flexibility of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. A digital-first approach allowed us to adopt an entirely new mindset and create something we’ve never done before.”

Having been out of endurance racing for a few years and facing the challenge of developing the ultimate endurance car within a matter of months, Peugeot Sport sought advanced aerodynamics expertise. It found the answer in Dassault Systèmes and its Virtual Twin as a Service approach. Through this special partnership, Dassault Systèmes’ simulation experts joined up with the PEUGEOT design team and became directly involved in the daily development of the 9X8, helping to guide the car’s aerodynamic design, set the wind tunnel sessions and define a future development plan.

Thanks to the high caliber of its simulation results from SIMULIA on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, Peugeot Sport could be sure of the 9X8’s theoretical performance before physical testing. This virtual twin served as the basis for the first physical full-scale model for testing in the wind tunnel. Now, the 9X8 is clocking miles on the racetrack and feeding back data to the same virtual twin to further enhance performance and guide future development.

Read the full story here and watch the video to discover exactly how the Peugeot Sport team was able to create a truly disruptive concept for its 9X8 Hybrid Hypercar and save significant time, money and resources in the process by outsourcing its aerodynamic capabilities to Dassault Systèmes.