Peugeot has selected Australian company Garry Rogers Motorsport to design and build a brand new TCR version of the Peugeot 308 for 2024 onwards, it has been revealed.
According to the Australia-based Wide World of Sport, the team, which has successfully run Peugeot cars in TCR Australia since the series’ second season in 2021, has been awarded an exclusive contract to build an updated version of the popular racer.
In 2023, GRM is running four Peugeot 308 TCR cars for Jordan Cox, Aaron Cameron, Kody Garland and Ben Bargwanna.
Cars will be built in Australia and exported to the rest of the world. In recent season, the Peugeot 308 TCR has been a popular car in TCR Europe, TCR South America and TCR Denmark as well as in Australia.
“Our relationship started back in 2020, Peugeot wanted to bring a car across to Australia and bring a French driver at the time,” said Gerry Rogers to the Australian publication.
“We ran one at Tailem Bend for them back then. From there, we came to an arrangement with Peugeot Sport in France to bring five Peugeots to Australia, the current 308s that we’re racing.
“We’ve had a great relationship over the last couple of years with Peugeot in-house at GRM and have had the ability to produce some of the homologated components for those cars, which has certainly helped our racing program with the Peugeots here.
“Through the relationship with Peugeot Sport, the opportunity came first with the hybrid 308s road car being released in Australia and TCR going hybrid globally in 2024, we’ve got that opportunity to integrate that hybrid system into the car.
“So we’ve been doing some R&D development at work and that’s developed now into the fact that Peugeot has tasked us with homologating a whole new 308 for the 2024 season based on the road car that has just been released this year.
“It’s a really exciting program at GRM to build a global car. Obviously, we’ve had some experience over the years, most recently with the Volvo in Supercars, but building a car that’s going to be racing around the world in Europe, South America, Asia, Africa is something we’re really excited to be doing.”
GRM will build a minimum of ten cars to begin with, in accordance with the TCR regulations.
“We’ve got a production line at work and a fair bit of design work to do now. We’ll be really keen to have these cars released at the start of the 2024 season.
“The pressure from Peugeot isn’t for them to necessarily be ready for the start of the season, but internally we’d love to aim for that date, on track at Race Tasmania, this time next year.”