David Porter, Racing An Endurance Icon, The Peugeot 908 HDI FAP

As a racing fan, or even a racing driver there are the standard questions – and included amongst them is the question – If you could what is the Dream car you’d own and race?

A lucky few get to make that choice and one of them, US-based Scot, David Porter is now living the dream with his fantasy race car – a 2010 Peugeot 908 HDI FAP, the car has been seen racing in Masters Endurance Legends in Europe, but is now based in the USA where it has been a regular feature in the events organised stateside by Masters Historic.

David, I know you’ve got a racing history before your involvement in historic prototype racing?

“I started in ’81 and always wanted to race, but like so many people never had the money to do it.

“I had a Lotus Elan road car, which was stolen and the insurance company gave me a cheque that was actually worth a lot more than the car!

“So I thought, what am I going to do with this? and I decided, let’s get racing out of my system!
I’ll buy a Formula Ford and do some pre ’74 races.

“So I bought a (Royale) RP16 and lo and behold, it turned out I was actually, even in an RP16, reasonably competitive. And from that moment on I was just bitten.

“In ’87 I won the Pre-74 championship and then I did half a season of Formula Three with a sponsor and then the sponsor pulled out.

“Then I came to the States, my company transferred me to the US. So actually didn’t race for a little while.

“Then I went back to Formula Ford and did what they call Club Ford over here, then I did a couple of seasons of Formula Ford 2000 doing the USAC Pro Series and had some top six finishes – I actually qualified sixth overall on oval at New Hampshire with 50 cars in the field in a Swift DB3-89 which by them was pretty outdated.

“With family commitments there was an eight or nine year break from racing before I bought a March 79B Formula Atlantic car, which I had until last year, and a Lotus sports, a ’69 Formula Ford, an Indy Lights car – I won the historic Indy Lights championship two years in a row in ’11 and 12 – and then I kind of had a “What am I going to do next?” moment!”

And then you spotted the opportunity to move to sports cars?

“Travis Engen was running his Audi R8 and I thought that looked kind of cool. And at that very time someone called me to say – “Do you know there’s a Pescarolo in the United States. And this was the Rollcentre car. It had come over here to be raced in ALMS in 2009 and then obviously 2009 was a disaster and the sponsor disappeared, and the car had been bought by Rudy Junco.

“His son was using it as a training car would you believe? It wasn’t really for sale. But I got in touch with Rudy and we had what I would euphemistically described as a negotiation of the price of the car.

“With hindsight, I bought it incredibly cheaply. But at the time, it didn’t seem like it!

“But the car was absolutely marvellous and it came with a complete Le Mans spares package. I ended up racing that car for seven seasons and we basically run and won everything in it. We wwon the Daytona Classic, the Sebring Classic. We won at every other track. And really, after George Robinson disappeared, we were the car to beat.”

But then this Bob Berridge came into the story?

“I happened to contact him one day, and we were talking, because I raced against Bob back in pre ’74 days. And we’d sort of kept in touch over the years. And he said, Well, I’ve just ended up owning seven Peugeot 908s, would you like to buy one?

“And, as you know, Bob could be quite persuasive! it took me about two months to buy it from him because Bob is probably the only person who’s a tougher negotiator than Rudy Junco!

“But in the end, I bought chassis 10 which is I think one of the most interesting of the 908s if you discount the Le Mans winner and I’ve been racing it since.”

So tell us about the history of your car.

“It’s chassis 10, built up in 2010, raced by the works team in 2010 raced by Hugues de Chaunac and Oreca in 2011. The car won the Silverstone 6 Hours (above), probably the most dominant win by Peugeot 908 in 2010 with Nicolas Minassian and Andrew Davidson driving. It also won the Zhuhai 6 Hours and came second at Petit Le Mans in 2010.

“In 2011, with Oreca, it had its biggest and probably its most significant win, winning the Sebring 12 hours outright and beating all the work’s cars.

It also came second at Petit Le Mans that year.

Basically it had only done seven races when I bought it, it was the last (908 HDi FAP) chassis made. It was never crashed, which is great!”

An astonishing car?

“I truly run out of adjectives describing how incredible these cars are.

“Bob really pushed me to buy a 90X. When I went over there to sit in the car I took one sit in there and I said, Bob, I’m not buying this car, I can’t see bugger all, which for a pro driver is fine. But for an amateur driver, I think it’s a disaster. I mean, they are theoretically quicker. But it was very interesting to hear (on Marshall Pruett’s Peugeot retrospective podcast) all the pros seeing how much they preferred the older car after they’d experienced the 908.

So we get to the stage where you’ve decided to buy a car, Was there a choice of car available?

“The other car on offer was chassis 9 which was the car that won Petit Le Mans with the factory but I just felt this car with its Oreca history and the fact that it won Sebring, it really seemed to tick all the boxes for me – and it was the last one built.

“But what I didn’t know, which I only find out when I bought the car, was in order for the car to run grandfathered in 2011 they absolutely strangled the living daylights out of it.

“So when I bought it, it was in 2011 trim. And that was what give rise to the accident at Brands Hatch. Because the car, quite honestly, you couldn’t pass the LMP2 cars with it.

“I mean, it’s just amazing how they absolutely slaughtered it. I wasn’t at the stage then, it my first race with the car, and I didn’t get to test it, so I wasn’t able to exploit the full capabilities of the car, which quite honestly, even to this day, I’m not!

“The end result of that was, I was struggling desperately to pass Nicky Leutwiler, and I decided that passing him on the outside going down the hill into Hawthorns would be a good idea. And he decided it wasn’t and pulled over and put us both in the barrier of 143 miles an hour!

And that led, I guess to one of the major challenges of running these cars- how easy are they to fix if something gets broken?

“We couldn’t have done it without Bob and BBM. There’s no doubt about that it’s just an enormous challenge. But luckily, by the time I bought my car, Bob was already running Kriton (Lendoudis) and Chassis 09.

“They prepped the car where, by the time of my next race after the Brands Hatch disaster, at the Silverstone Classic, it was immaculate and ran absolutely faultlessly all weekend, it was absolutely marvellous (pictured below with Kriton Lendoudis’s Chassis 9).

“These cars just run and run – built to take 24 hours of punishment in the hands of people like Nick Minassian. And, in the sort of races we do – we’re doing two 40 minute races, the reliability even compared with the Pescarolo, which I thought was a very reliable racecar. But the Peugeot is on another plane altogether.

Are there any blocks to running the car?

“We’ve had a couple of challenges. One was fuel. We were basically running on probably 10 year old fuel when I bought the car, the Shell LM24 which is no longer made.

“But I actually worked with ETS fuels who were very supportive. And they’ve come up with something that’s almost a copy. They couldn’t make a straight copy because of patent reasons. But they came up with a fuel which was almost identical, and we’ve been running on that all last season.

“Other than that, there’s been a few hiccups with spare parts. I mean, Bob has an enormous inventory of parts, but we don’t have everything. Everything on this car is bespoke, and a lot of it was made in France for obvious reasons. And we found that with the top bearings for the push rods on the front, are just the weirdest spec, and they’re not available anywhere. So we’re basically having to have those made.

“There’s been a couple of issues like that, but really not that many. And then Bob’s deal with me, and he’s been 100% on it with this, is that any time I need a part, he sends me a part of one of the other cars. And then it becomes BBMs issue to source the parts after that.

Tell me a little bit about the experience of driving this thing – a big leap even from the Pescarolo?

“The Pescarolos were actually remarkable cars. The budget was probably around a 100th of Peugeots or Audis. And yet, with the help of the ACO and the rules structure, they were really competitive cars.
I found at Sebring, for instance, I’m about a second and a half quicker than I was in the Pescarolo.

“And at Daytona I’m about a second quicker, which doesn’t sound an awful lot. But when you look at the laptimes you’re doing, 1:36s at Daytona and 1:50s at Sebring, to get that sort of improvement is, just shows you how good the Peugeot is.

“The main thing about driving the Peugeot is the fact that with a diesel first, second and third gears last, really, a nanosecond. It’s almost as fast as you can hit the paddles, because it only revs to 4000 and it ticks over at 2000!”

So tell me about the driving experience?

“It’s very easy to drive up to a point. I think the main problem for anybody who wasn’t used to one of these cars, if you got in it and drove it at all hard, your neck would let go in two laps with the G-forces.

“But I was used to that with the Indy Lights car and the Pescarolo and as a result, what I find with this car is the faster you push it, the faster you go, it’s truly remarkable.

“With the Pescarolo I tended to be a ‘greedy on the throttle’ driver. And particularly on the infield of Daytona I would always try and get back on the throttle too fast.

“If you did that in the Pescarolo it would just push and there was nothing you could do about it. And it wasn’t a set-up thing, because I had Joao (Barbosa) drive the car and he said, it’s just the way the car is – it was built for Le Mans.

“Whereas with the Peugeot you just put your foot down in these tight corners. And with the aid of the traction control, which is a technological marvel, somehow or other it manages 880 foot pounds of torque in first gear coming out of these corners.

“It is fairly easy to drive up to a point, but then once you start to push it, it takes a fair bit of intestinal fortitude to have the belief in the car. The belief in the car is what you need. Because the faster you go, the more downforce you get and the faster it’ll go.”

What kind of power are you running in the car now in contemporary historic racing,

“It’s exactly the same as it was in 2010. We actually managed to get David Messenger who wrote the maps for these engines back in the day, he wrote me a new map, which he said was a copy of the map they used in 2010. So it should be exactly the way it was at Silverstone in 2010. And we haven’t put it on a dyno but I’m told it’s about 880 foot pounds of torque and somewhere in the region of 800 horsepower

“There’s nine engine maps and I try to run it on map 7. Because if I stick to map 7, I can run the engine for 20,000 kms. Whereas if I go to map 9 comes down to 5000!

I remember that Nick Minassian showed me over your car and we were looking in the cockpit and I asked him what does the boost button did – it was some form of overboost which could only be used at night becuse it kicked out a lot of smoke!

“Nowadays what that does is if I’m running on map 7, if I press the boost button that gives me 30 seconds of map 9, okay, so that tends to be the way I drive it.

“The other thing we’ve found is, for instance, on the infield at Daytona using map 9, the traction control is so effective that in fact map 9 doesn’t give you very much as we’re pushing the limits of the TC.

“So I find that I go faster using maps 7 plus push to pass than I do just running map nine all the way around the track.”

Now you get a little bit more opportunity in the states to race them. We are here at the moment, what’s the plan for 2021 for the car?

“We’ll be back at Sebring in March for a support race for the 12 hours. Then we go to Watkins Glen, Road, America and back to Daytona, that’s what I’ve planned so far.

“I also want to do Road Atlanta, because we went to Atlanta last year, the car was sensational there.
Going through the Esses at Road Atlanta, I was speechless afterwards, the way it grips, and then you’re flat from the top of the hill until the time you hit the brakes to go up onto the straight down the sticks. It’s truly outstanding.

“But, unfortunately, it threw it down with rain for both races. And I don’t race the car in the rain unless I absolutely have to.

“So we qualified on pole by a second and a half and then I didn’t get to race. So that’s definitely unfinished business there. I’m just trying to pick the best events to go to!”

That, right there, has to be close to the dream North American calendar!
Tell me a bit about the reaction from your peers, and from fans, both in Europe and particularly the US when the car emerged?

“You know, the most startling thing about this car is I’ve lost count of the number of teenagers and 20 year olds who come up to me.

“One kid just stood there for, I guarantee, 45 minutes at Sebring looking at this car. You know why? Because he’s a gamer. And this is the car he uses in his gaming. It’s really been noticeable how many young kids come up and they’re absolutely enraptured with this car. And it’s all because of the interest created by the virtual versions of the car.

“It’s absolutely marvellous, we can get these kids to come and spectate and be part of the sport. And maybe one of these days when they get wealthy, they’ll buy a car and go racing.”

How healthy is the scene in the States at the moment for this period of historic racing?

“I feel so sorry for Ron (Maydon – Owner of Masters Historic), because I think his timing on Masters was absolutely superb but on the other hand, absolutely terrible, because at Daytona in 2019, we had, I think, eight LMP1 cars, plus a lot of LMP2 cars, it was the most fabulous event. But then COVID comes along, and I thought this was all going to take off. We had a terrific programme of tracks for last year.

“And then most of the guys I raced against, unfortunately, most of them just disappeared. Juan (Gonzalez) didn’t race his Pescarolo all year, my old car, Randy (Johnson) didn’t race his (ex-factory) Pescarolo. Really, there was very little opposition last year, it was mainly Pro-driven LMP2 cars that were giving me trouble.

“So I really hope we can get back to something resembling normality this year, because I think there’s a tremendous interest. And I think we could have great grids of both protos and GT cars.

So what do you think for the future? I take it got no plans to move on to anything from the Peugeot?

“No, that’s it for me. I also have a Lotus Cortina which I love and eventually what will happen is the Peugeot will go and I’ll settle in just being an old guy racing a Lotus Cortina but I’m far from that at the moment.

“I’ve told everybody that I’ll race the Peugeot as long as I’m competitive.

“It’s a privilege and I have to pinch myself sometimes that I’m actually lucky enough to own and drive this car. I have a line of pro drivers who would literally take a number, who would love to drive. It is a marvellous piece of kit.”

The post David Porter, Racing An Endurance Icon, The Peugeot 908 HDI FAP first appeared on dailysportscar.com.