2024 Peugeot 9X8 'harder to extract performance' than old car

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The current version of the Peugeot 9X8 is proving trickier extract performance from, compared to the previous version of the car, the manufacturer's technical director Olivier Jansonnie told Only Endurance.

'To be honest, we found it much harder than expected to extract the performance of the car,' he said.

'It's significantly different, the car, the tyres are different from what we had with the old one.

'The old one, we kind of learnt how to optimise. It was not at the level expected but at least it was optimised, I would say. '

Peugeot introduced the 'new' version of the 9X8 last year at the second round of the 2024 championship, at Imola. They've raced the car for a year, then, with its best result a third-placed finish at Bahrain in last year's season-ending 8 Hours of Bahrain.

That's compared to the 'old' car, the wingless version, which raced in 2022 and 203. That car also took a single podium finish, at Monza in 2023.

However, in the two races so far this year, Peugeot have taken two ninth-placed finishes, one at Lusail in Qatar and one at Imola.

'With the new [9X8], we are discovering every day still, but I think everybody is also discovering. You can see that we we are improving,' Jansonnie continued.

'At the same time, our relative pace compared to the competition was not really improved for the last three, four races. And the only explanation to that is everybody is pushing and improving.'

Imola 'not a very good race' for Peugeot

Jansonnie also reflected on Imola and Peugeot's fortunes in Italy, telling reporters that it wasn't an overly successful result for the French manufacturer.

'Looking back to Imola, it was kind of a disappointing race for us in reality. We were expecting to achieve better results.

'Not just judging by the pace we had in free practice and what we could do in qualifying as well. I mean, quali was clear improvements.

'I think we know where it comes from. We work very hard for that, trying to optimise everything. We also believe that the pace in Imola was actually a bit better than we could display in the race.'

Peugeot qualified seventh at Imola, with Jean-Eric Vergne getting the #93 car into Hyperpole. That marked the French manufacturer's best result in Hyperpole in 2025, beating the same car's 10th place at Qatar.

However, as Jansonnie relates, Peugeot's race went awry early on. The #93, which had sat in sixth for most of the stint, pitted on lap 35 and, once the cycle had shaken out, sat 11th after the first round of stops.

'Then it all went wrong in the race for us, from the first pitstop.

'And then we had a bit offset in strategy via the safety car, coming at the wrong time for us. We made some mistakes, so it's not just random, but it was not a very good race.

'Sometimes it happens. We had we had some races where we optimise everything, showing good result, last year in Fuji and Bahrain.

'It was the other way around. We didn't manage to make it work, the way we should have worked. So, disappointments.

'Still, it's better to have it here and then come back here and be also in this kind of mentality.'

Good pace, bad result

Jansonnie then expanded on this when asked if the race pace itself was disappointing, or just the result.

'I think with the pace we had... for sure we were out of contention for a podium or whatever, but at least we could have done something much better with that pace.

'At least one of our cars was in traffic for most of the race. We didn't manage to extract it from there from, we were using the usual strategy, which is something we have to optimise in that case.

'And resulting in the end, in the race where actually the best we could achieve was P9. But it's a hard fight and just even in those places, p8 P9 P10, for every place now it's it's very very tight performance wise.

'So in Imola, we would hope to be better in extracting the performance and getting a little better results.'

When looking at the average pace over the race, Peugeot's pace was firmly mid-field. That said, the race at Imola was heavily dictated by tyre and fuel strategy.

This makes it hard to fully ascertain how various cars were performing, and so is hard to say, without more data, that Peugeot over or under-performed.

A positive Spa test

Peugeot tested at Spa alongside a few of their rivals in the Hypercar class, with Jansonnie declaring the team happy with how it went.

'It was a positive test for us,' he said.

'Drivers were quite happy with the car. Always difficult to judge on your pace, but still. The track is very different. What we discovered in the test was the track is very, very different from what it was about a year with the resurfacing.

'I believe part of the the result here will come from the optimisation of the tyre strategy. Even if everyone ends up running medium, what you can do with it in the tyre strategy and how you distribute your tyres along the race will be very important.

'We need to assess very quickly in free practice the amount of degradation we having, which will dictate the tyre choices we're making.'

Like we've seen with the two free practice sessions so far, the lap times are substantially quicker, for all cars, compared to last year.

'I expect the lap times to come down a lot, because the track has been resurfaced in places very important for lap time,' said the Frenchman.

'It's not everywhere, but it's in places where the grip was very much limiting the performance,' said Jansonnie.

With two slightly under parr results for Peugeot so far this year, the French manufacturer really needs to score a decent result at Spa to move themselves up the championship standings. We'll aim to speak with Peugeot representatives again after the race to assess how it went.

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