Our Blog 1/2023

Robert Peugeot decided that he wanted to do his own thing, rather than join the family firm, and created Lion-Peugeot, which despite the name was a completely separate entity from the older concern. Specialising in small engined machines, Robert saw Voiturette racing (Edwardian Formula 2) as an obvious outlet for his company’s creativity and success came swiftly.

12-Jan-23 historicracing.com

The rules were originally designed to deliberately favour single-cylinder engines and Lion-Peugeot’s first efforts were fairly conventional. But the rules also, unintentionally, encouraged the use of long-stroke engines. The Lion-Peugeot engines became taller and taller in the search for more power and, as they did, the trophy cabinet got stacked higher and higher at the same rate.
The team’s engineers became so specialised in this field that when they expanded into multi-cylinder engines, they kept the same format. This reached it’s ultimate expression in the 1910 car shown here. A 3.5 Litre Vee-4 with a cylinder stroke of 260mm, and interesting 'overhead' exhausting! Sadly though, it didn’t translate well into their road car products and (who’d have guessed?) proved to be a technical dead end.