Peugeot's involvement in motorsport predates the sport's formal existence. A Peugeot won the world's first motor race, the Paris–Rouen of 1894, with Albert Lemaître at the wheel. Five Peugeots qualified for the main event and all finished. Peugeot also contested the gruelling Paris–Bordeaux–Paris, and in 1899 Lemaître won the Nice–Castellane–Nice rally in a special 5,850cc 20-horsepower racer.
After a period of competitive difficulty — including a failed attempt at the 1902 Paris–Vienna Rally — Peugeot temporarily withdrew from racing. The company would return more than a decade later with machinery that would rewrite the rulebook.
Peugeot's return to major Grand Prix competition in 1912 was one of the most significant moments in early motorsport history. The company assembled a team of driver-engineers including Jules Goux, Paolo Zuccarelli, and Georges Boillot — collectively nicknamed "Les Charlatans" — and appointed 26-year-old Swiss engineer Ernest Henry to turn their ideas into racing machinery.
The result was revolutionary: a dual overhead camshaft (DOHC) 7.6-litre four-cylinder engine with four valves per cylinder. This configuration, now universal in performance engines, was essentially unknown in racing at the time. Boillot won the 1912 French Grand Prix at an average of 68.45 mph, even after losing third gear and taking a 20-minute pit stop.
In May 1913, Jules Goux took one of these Peugeots to Indianapolis and won at an average of 75.92 mph, recording straightaway speeds of 93.5 mph — making Peugeot the first non-American-based manufacturer to win at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. For the 1913 French Grand Prix, an improved 5,655cc variant was fielded with a pioneering ball-bearing crankshaft, gear-driven camshafts, and dry-sump lubrication — features that rapidly became standard across racing. Boillot won again, becoming the first double winner of the event.
In 1914, Boillot's 3-litre L5 set a new Indianapolis lap record of 99.5 mph in practice, and a Peugeot placed second at the race. Similar models won at Indianapolis in 1916 driven by Dario Resta, and in 1919 by Howdy Wilcox, giving Peugeot three Indianapolis 500 victories in the pioneer era. At the 1914 French Grand Prix, the company was overmatched by Mercedes despite introducing four-wheel brakes — a genuine innovation deployed ahead of the field.
After the First World War, Peugeot resumed limited competition activity while focusing primarily on volume car production. Racing continued at a modest level: a Peugeot driven by Boillot won the 1919 Targa Florio, and the company claimed victory at the 1922 and 1925 Coppa Florios, the 1923 and 1925 Touring Car Grands Prix, and the 1926 Spa 24 Hours. Peugeots also placed in the 1925 Targa Florio.
An attempt at full Grand Prix racing in the early 1920s with a five-valve-per-cylinder, triple overhead cam engine conceived by Marcel Gremillon proved unsuccessful — a rare technical overreach for a company whose earlier innovations had set the benchmark. The company then stepped back from the front line of international Grand Prix competition, content with national and endurance victories while competitors such as Alfa Romeo and Bugatti dominated the European stage.
The technical innovations of the 1912–1914 Peugeot Grand Prix cars had an influence far beyond any single race result. The DOHC four-valve layout Henry designed was adopted across the industry and remained the dominant architecture for high-performance engines throughout the century. The dry-sump lubrication and gear-driven camshaft solutions pioneered on the 1913 car similarly became standard practice. When Peugeot returned to top-level motorsport in the 1980s under the Peugeot Sport banner, the company could draw on a legacy that stretched back to the very birth of organised motor racing.