French manufacturer Peugeot has picked Bathurst 1000-winning team Garry Rogers Motorsport to design and manufacture its TCR cars from 2024, it can be revealed.
Speaking exclusively with Wide World of Sport, team co-owner Barry Rogers confirmed plans to manufacture the Peugeot 308 TCR car in-house.
The deal will see the team build and export cars, which will race not only in Australia but in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa.
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Garry Rogers Motorsport has been part of the racing landscape Down Under for more than two decades, most famously racing in Supercars and winning the Great Race at Mt Panorama in 2000.
Now, its resources are largely dedicated to the SpeedSeries program with entries in the TCR Australia Series, National Trans Am Series, and S5000.
It’s that focus on the TCR Australia Series, which sees them house five Peugeot 308 TCR cars, that opened the door for the two parties to form a partnership.
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“Our relationship started back in 2020, Peugeot wanted to bring a car across to Australia and bring a French driver at the time,” Rogers explained.
“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.”
Running a fleet of TCR cars is one thing, but manufacturing them is another.
Garry Rogers Motorsport will be required to manufacture at least 10 cars, to begin with.
The team isn’t entirely unfamiliar with building cars having designed and built Supercars since the 1990s.
Garry Rogers Motorsport was also the official Volvo outfit from 2013 to 2016.
In recent years, the team designed and built the V8-powered S5000 in part.
“Initially with a program like this, you’ve got to produce 10 from the start,” said Rogers.
“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.
“We’ll get our heads down, bums up and into it.”
Part of the deal could see a driver from France race in Australia.
This year, Garry Rogers Motorsport driver Ben Bargwanna will contest two rounds of the TCR World Tour in a Peugeot.
Bargwanna is the son of Bathurst 1000 winner Jason Bargwanna, who was part of the Bathurst 1000-winning effort by Garry Rogers Motorsport in 2000.
The opening round of the 2023 TCR Australia Series takes place at Symmons Plains on February 24-26.
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