Peugeot Confident New 9X8 Will Keep Le Mans Strength

Peugeot technical chief Olivier Jansonnie is confident that the updated 9X8 2024 will be just as strong in the 24 Hours of Le Mans as the initial version of the car was last year.

The new iteration of the French manufacturer’s Le Mans Hypercar was revealed on Monday and is set to make its debut in next month’s second round of the FIA World Endurance Championship at Imola.

While the original 9X8 struggled for pace at most tracks last year, the Circuit de la Sarthe proved to be one of the best circuits for the car, as the No. 94 Peugeot led 34 laps at Le Mans and was in the running for a podium finish until a crash for Gustavo Menezes.

Although the new version of the car features a different aerodynamic concept, highlighted by the addition of a rear wing, and wider rear tires, Jansonnie feels there is no reason that Peugeot can’t enjoy a similarly strong run at Le Mans this year.

“I wouldn’t say Le Mans was specifically good for us because of the ground effect, but I think our car concept overall, aero and tires, was less of a disadvantage at Le Mans than other places,” Jansonnie told selected media, including Sportscar365.

“We still believe we can achieve the same performance at Le Mans as we did with the old car. Besides the performance, there’s so much you learn from that race by just doing it, and we learnt a lot last year in terms of preparation, set-up, strategy.

“I think we can carry that over with the new car and be stronger at Le Mans than we were last year.”

The original 9X8 scored only one podium finish in last year’s Monza race, although the car enjoyed its best performance in this month’s Qatar season opener as the smooth track surface and lack of slow-speed corners suited Peugeot’s ‘wingless’ challenger well.

Only a late refueling issue prevented the No. 93 car shared by Jean-Eric Vergne, Nico Mueller and Mikkel Jensen from finishing second, which would have marked the best result of the program to date.

However, tracks such as Fuji Speedway and Bahrain proved particularly troublesome as the 9X8 was unable to match the performance of its Hypercar rivals in slower corners.

Jansonnie believes the new iteration of the car will be more consistent across the board, even if the gain in performance compared with the original 9X8 varies from track to track.

“We think that the gains we see from tire dimensions and being more consistent over a stint are not so much track dependent,” he said. “It should be better with the new car in terms of tire management and consistency.

“We’ve identified most of the reasons why the performance was so different [with the old car] depending on the layout, or the roughness or bumpiness of the track. We tried to cure those issues, and work on the tracks where we were weaker.

“We were missing low-speed traction, mostly because of the tire dimensions, so this should be improved quite a lot hopefully, and we know that from the aero concept that we had with the underfloor, we are struggling a bit on bumpy tracks. 

“Hopefully we will be more ‘average’ and the car performance will be more robust for the track layout.”

Asked if he felt any strengths of the old car would be lost with the new 9X8, Jansonnie replied: “There were some tracks where the tire consistency was pretty good, but now we are in the unknown. We will be able to tell after a couple of events.

“We had some things in terms of tire management that frankly were quite good with the old car, which we saw again in Qatar. We don’t know how hard it will be to achieve the same consistency with the new tire dimensions.”