Shwartzman joins Peugeot for 2027 after a season without a drive
The 26-year-old returns to Hypercar racing with a factory seat after Prema Racing's IndyCar collapse left him without a drive for an entire year.
Robert Shwartzman will drive for Team Peugeot TotalEnergies in the 2027 FIA World Endurance Championship. He has not raced anywhere in 2026, and he has never driven the car. His first laps in the 9X8 come at the Algarve in the middle of this month.
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Two seasons out of Hypercar, with a team collapse in between
Shwartzman last raced in Hypercar in 2024, in the satellite AF Corse Ferrari 499P, and he won in it. He took the Lone Star Le Mans at the Circuit of the Americas that year alongside Robert Kubica and Yifei Ye, which remains the strongest line on his endurance record.
He then left Ferrari for IndyCar with Prema, and the first half of that gamble looked inspired. In May 2025 he put the car on pole for the Indianapolis 500 as a rookie, the first rookie to do it since Teo Fabi in 1983.
The second half went badly. The Rosin family, who founded Prema in 1983 and had run it for more than four decades, left the organisation in January 2026 amid unpaid bills from the 2025 IndyCar season and a wider financial squeeze. The team missed the 2026 IndyCar season, and Shwartzman, who held a contract for it, was left without a drive. He has spent the entire year watching.
His first laps in the 9X8 come at the Algarve
The test in Portugal in mid-September will be Peugeot’s second outing with the heavily revised 2027 version of the 9X8, after the car ran for the first time at Paul Ricard at the end of July. It will also be the first time Shwartzman sits in it.
That order matters. Peugeot has not handed a seat to a driver who already knows the car and can be dropped straight in. It has committed to him first and will find out what he can do afterwards, which is a different kind of decision.
Peugeot is rebuilding rather than plugging a gap
Team principal Emmanuel Esnault called Shwartzman “unquestionably one of the most promising talents of his generation,” and said “his natural speed, adaptability and maturity make him an ideal fit for our project.” He added that the Israeli is “already fully involved in the preparation of our 2027 program and will play an important role in the team’s future.”
That is the language of a multi-year plan rather than a one-season stopgap, and it fits what Peugeot is doing with the car. The 2027 9X8 is a substantial revision of a machine that has spent its whole life short of the front, and the programme around it is being rebuilt at the same time.
Shwartzman sounds like a driver who has had a long year. “I’m extremely happy to be returning to the FIA World Endurance Championship after my time racing in the United States,” he said. “Endurance racing is something I’ve really missed over the past two seasons.” He also described feeling “immediately part of the project, within a highly professional and ambitious environment.”
Vandoorne and Jakobsen out, Vergne and Quinn in
Shwartzman is one piece of a substantial reshuffle. Stoffel Vandoorne and Malthe Jakobsen leave at the end of this season. Theo Pourchaire is expected to step away to concentrate on his Formula E programme with Opel, another Stellantis brand, a move that had been signposted for some weeks.
Coming the other way, reserve driver Alex Quinn is set to be promoted to a race seat, and Jean-Eric Vergne is poised to return after a 2026 spent on Formula E. Peugeot is also looking at Doriane Pin, the 2025 F1 Academy champion, for a test and reserve role, with a December test at Paul Ricard scheduled to inform that decision.
Esnault has said there are “still some decisions to make” before the lineup is finished, so more announcements are coming.
Our view: he and Mick Schumacher have swapped places
The neat detail in all this is what happened in the opposite direction. Mick Schumacher left Alpine’s Hypercar programme and signed with Meyer Shank Racing for IndyCar in 2027, while Shwartzman is going from IndyCar back into Hypercar. Two drivers of similar age and similar single-seater pedigree have crossed in mid-air, each convinced the other’s paddock is where the opportunity is.
For Shwartzman the logic is easy to follow. A factory contract with a manufacturer that is rebuilding around him beats another year of waiting for an IndyCar seat that may not be funded. The risk is the car. Peugeot has been the slowest of the big Hypercar programmes for most of the 9X8’s life, and a heavy revision is a promise rather than a result.
The revised car will be measured against Toyota, Ferrari and BMW, who are currently separated by 21 points at the top of the 2026 championship. That is the standard Peugeot has to reach. Shwartzman gets his first indication of whether it can in a fortnight, in Portugal.
