Peugeot’s Stoffel Vandoorne, reflecting on how qualifying went for the French manufacturer, lamented that after so much effort had been put into their new 9X8, it was ‘not nice’ to end up with P14 and P15.
“Yeah, we’re just quite far off,” said the Belgian.
“That’s the frustrating part about it. You put so much work in, you go testing, you do all these meetings, you try to get the car in the right window. You know, it’s not nice to end up with this result.”
Vandoorne qualified the #94 Peugeot 9X8 in 14th, with a 1:31.651, 1.455 seconds off the pace, while teammate Jean-Eric Vergne went 15th fastest, just under a tenth off his stablemate.
Vandoorne continued, “But let’s wait and see, it’s still a new car for us. We haven’t tested here, so we’ve been playing around a lot with the setup, trying to put it in a better window and stuff. Are we optimised? I doubt that we’re optimised. For sure that plays a little bit of a part as well. But yeah, let’s wait and see.
One problem the racer identified is with tyre warmup, a big topic this weekend with the relatively cold temperatures at times and a low-energy track.
“Today we were struggling massively with [tyre] warmup on the medium tyres, the softest we have here. We were really poor on tyre warmup out of the pitlane. The Ferraris and Porsches were driving around us like we were standing still.
“I think when you look at Peugeot over the last couple of years, I don’t think it’s been a strong point as well. Switching on the tyres for qualifying and extracting the peak of the tyres, I think that’s something we still need to work a bit. We haven’t really focused that much on it.”
On the question of pure pace, though, Vandoorne was keen to emphasise his belief that it was down to one thing, largely out of Peugeot’s control.
“It’s a new car, they haven’t really got much data of the new car. So I think it’s also hard to judge where to put us, but when you look at it, the numbers, we are pretty much the worst of everyone, let’s say, in terms of weight and power.
“And these cars are already heavy, just as a standard car. They’re heavy, they’re not light cars. So I think that can play a part. But tomorrow, we’ll have a race with a lot of laps done, hopefully, and then I think they should have a little bit more data to judge us on for the next one,” he concluded.
