Courage Compétition, the French privateer constructor led by Yves Courage, built a series of Group C prototypes throughout the late 1980s under the Cougar designation. The C20 had achieved a remarkable third-place overall at the 1987 24 Hours of Le Mans, establishing the team as a serious competitor. The C22 represented a parallel development effort, likely intended to explore a slightly different specification alongside the C20 lineage. The 2.8-liter Porsche turbocharged engine was a noted variation, distinguishing the C22 technically from its contemporaries in the Courage stable.
The Cougar C22 made its race debut at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, where it retired after completing just 30 laps — a difficult start that reflected the challenges of endurance racing for privateer teams. Despite the retirement at Le Mans, the car continued to be developed and campaigned across the 1988 and 1989 seasons.
The car's strongest result came at the 1989 480 km of Dijon, a round of the World Sports-Prototype Championship held at the Circuit de Dijon-Prenois in France. Pascal Fabre and Jean-Louis Bousquet guided the C22 to a sixth-place overall finish, which stood as the car's best competitive result across its career.
The C22 was driven by a notably large roster of drivers over its two seasons of competition. Those who piloted the car included Ukyou Katayama, Francois Migault, Paul Belmondo, Pascal Fabre, Herve Regout, Jean-Denis Deletraz, Fabien Giroix, Oscar Manautou, Alessandro Santin, Jean-Louis Bousquet, Bernard de Dryver, Denis Morin, Bernard Santal, Patrick Gonin, and Jiro Yoneyama. The breadth of this driver list — spanning French, Belgian, Japanese, and other nationalities — was typical of privateer Group C entries that were made available to paying drivers or shared across multiple race programs in the same season.
The World Sports-Prototype Championship in 1988 and 1989 was dominated by the factory Sauber-Mercedes and Jaguar programs, which consistently occupied the top positions. Privateer constructors such as Courage Compétition occupied the mid-field and lower positions in the overall standings, but played an essential role in maintaining grid numbers at championship rounds and provided opportunities for drivers who would not otherwise have access to top-level machinery. The sixth-place finish at Dijon in 1989 was a competitive result by the standards of a privateer entry in this environment.
The Cougar C22 represented one of several parallel development threads that Courage Compétition pursued through the late Group C era. While it did not match the podium result achieved by the C20 at the 1987 Le Mans, it continued the team's presence in the World Sports-Prototype Championship and contributed to the accumulated experience that Courage Compétition carried into the 1990s with subsequent designs.