The Peugeot 607 Pescarolo Could Have Been France’s BMW M5*

You’d be entirely forgiven for not remembering the Peugeot 607. French brands still persist in building big executive saloons to this day, but they’ve always been hard sells to anyone besides French government agencies (ask yourself, when did you last see a DS 9?). The odd-looking and underwhelming 607 lasted a surprisingly long time, from 1999 to 2010, but Peugeot, perhaps wisely, hasn’t touched the segment since.

The 607’s slide into near-obscurity, though, could well have been avoided if it had pushed ahead with this long-forgotten 2002 concept: the 607 Pescarolo. It was a bizarre idea – big French saloons have always been about one thing: wafting. Yet here was Peugeot taking its BMW 5-series competitor and trying to turn it into a full-on M5 rival.

The name Pescarolo will be familiar to motorsport nerds (or people who played Gran Turismo 4). Henri Pescarolo is a retired French racing driver who had an unremarkable F1 career in the late ’60s and ’70s before going on to far more success in sports car racing, racking up six class wins at the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

After retiring from racing, he set up his own team, Pescarolo Sport, whose white, blue and green C60 Le Mans Prototypes often showed the big factory teams a thing or two in the 2000s. The C60 saw its greatest success when running a twin-turbo, race-prepped version of the V6 that was fitted to the Peugeot 607 at the time. See where this is going?

The 607 Pescarolo concept debuted at the 2002 Paris Motor Show. It sat 25mm lower than the standard 607, had its arches flared by the same amount, and had a big beefy chin spoiler and a new rear bumper with twin exhausts. It also rode on a set of shiny 19-inch alloys that, in a very 2002 move, looked like they were straight out of an issue of Max Power.

Things were a bit more restrained on the inside, where the 607 Pescarolo was a smorgasbord of burgundy leather. Some chunkier bucket seats were fitted and the natty black-on-white dials the standard 607 came with lent themselves nicely to the Pescarolo’s sporty nature.

Most notable, though, was what was under the bonnet – or what could have been, had Peugeot pressed on with this car. While the show car was presumably just built up from a regular 607, a press release at the time said it “could be adapted” to carry the 3.2-litre, twin-turbo V6 from the C60 race car.

Peugeot reckoned that, in roadgoing form, the engine would have pushed out over 400bhp, besting the 395bhp made by the 4.9-litre V8 in the then-current E39 BMW M5’s (although this was just a couple of years before the V10-powered, 500bhp E60 turned up and rewrote the super saloon rulebook).

All sounds fairly promising, but there’s a big asterisk: the 607 was front-wheel drive only, and by all accounts, the Pescarolo would have kept that layout. This was back in 2002, when the most powerful FWD car around was the 247bhp Alfa Romeo 147 GTA, which was, erm… dynamically challenged. Even 22 years later, the 325bhp Honda Civic Type R is as powerful as front-led cars get from the factory.

It was likely those pesky laws of physics, then, that was the main reason the 607 Pescarolo never went any further. That, and the fact that its projected sales were probably about the same as those of a car that came with a free rabid badger in the boot.

It wasn’t quite Peugeot’s last crack at a sports saloon. Some 18 years later, it launched the smaller, plug-in hybrid 508 Peugeot Sport Engineered. While it’s a decent car, it sold about as well as the 607 Pescarolo would have, and to nobody’s surprise, it’s just been dropped in the UK. Would things have been different if the 607 Pescarolo had gone beyond the concept stage? Almost definitely not, but it would have been entertaining finding out.