Behind the scenes of the preparation of Peugeot Sport and its wingless car

A car with the look of a shark with its gray skin, which merges with the clouds above the Paul Ricard circuit, at Le Castellet, with its dorsal fin and its fine LED canines. The Peugeot Sport team met at the end of March in the Var with its Peugeot 9×8 without spoilers, a unique concept, for two days of testing in order to prepare as well as possible for the next 24 Hours of Le Mans, which will take place in less than a month, on June 10 and 11. A return to the most legendary endurance race for the French team, after 10 years of absence.

The two cars entered in the endurance championship had already had the opportunity to run in the 1,000 miles of Sebring in March, but the team had to deal with mechanical problems. And above all, nothing replaces two days of testing on a typical configuration for the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the longest race on the calendar. On a “track that comes closest to it”, even if the team must “make endurance of more than 30 hours to replicate Le Mans, and no track really prepares for the 24 Hours”, according to Olivier Jansonnie, technical director from the program.

Reliability at the service of performance

If the team is present a little more than two months from the meeting of the year, it is to store up kilometers, they who had to give up the previous edition of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, because of the delay in the program. “The goal is to manage to optimize the track time we have, which is very important for us and which this year is limited, very regulated”, frames the technical director.

Olivier Jansonnie is the technical director of the Peugeot Sport program involved in the Endurance Championship (WEC). – Antonin Vincent

“The object is to do the kilometres, because the essential point is reliability. To have the performance, we must have the guarantee of reliability”, recalls Jean-Marc Finot, director of Stellantis Motorsport

A hard blow, then, when the Peugeot 9×8 of Jean-Eric Vergne, one of the young team’s drivers came to a standstill after a series of spins. The information given by the pilot is not a good sign. “It’s very hard because we always solve problems, and others arrive. It’s not that we’re not advancing, the cars are so sophisticated that we never have full control, ever. If we were able to drive hundreds of thousands of kilometres, we would find problems that we have no idea today. Performance and reliability are quite related. When you look for performance, there are problems. It’s a bit like a snake biting its own tail,” Olivier Jansonnie tries to reassure himself.

An increasingly raised plateau

Fortunately, after a few instructions from the technical team, Jean-Eric Vergne managed to restart his racing car to take the Signes bend fully loaded. “It’s always going in the right direction but never at the speed we want. The 24H is extremely demanding, it has become a 24-hour sprint race, so the cars have reached enormous levels of reliability, you have to be absolutely perfect,” emphasizes Jean-Marc Finot.

The aim of the two days of testing at Le Castellet is to rack up kilometers to test reliability.
The aim of the two days of testing at Le Castellet is to rack up kilometers to test reliability. – Antonin Vincent

Perfection is also more necessary than ever in the face of a plateau in the endurance championship (WEC) which is improving from season to season. Like this year with the arrivals of Ferrari, on the podium in the first three races, and Porsche, third in Portimao. When Peugeot has never done better than its 5th place in Portugal. “It’s more difficult, but also much more interesting. Sportingly, it’s complicated at all levels. We have to drive with everything we have, and from a reliability point of view that puts us in danger. We no longer have any reserves,” says Olivier Jansonnie.

A “marketing tool” tested at the 24 Hours of Le Mans

More spectacle on the track, for more visibility outside with a discipline which finally finds its superb with these new participants, of which Peugeot was one of the spearheads with its concept without spoiler. “We wanted to use all the new hypercar competition regulations which made it possible to make cars that were a bit different from classic prototypes. We made a stylistic and technical convergence, between motorsports engineers and design to recognize a real Peugeot. With elements of style and design codes from Peugeot and even future Peugeots that we will soon see on the road,” confides Jean-Marc Finot.

Because beyond the certain “technology laboratory” that the WEC represents for the brand, endurance is also “a marketing tool”, hence the importance of having “the visibility of a Peugeot on the track and that people have no doubts when they see the car go by”, recalls the director. But for the spectators to see the 9×8 pass, it obviously has to have no reliability problems, the heart of the project in this first full season, and of which the 24 Hours of Le Mans will be a perfect revealer.

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