The French automotive giant has announced plans to introduce further upgrades to its Peugeot 9X8 LMH for the 2025 WEC season.
The decision comes after a challenging 2024 campaign, where the team struggled to match the pace of its rivals despite introducing a revised version of the 9X8 earlier this year.
The 2024-spec Peugeot 9X8 LMH which debuted at the Imola 6 Hours in April, featured a significant overhaul, including a switch to 29cm front and 34cm rear tyres, a rearward shift in weight distribution, and the addition of a conventional rear wing.
While the changes were aimed at making the car less sensitive to different track configurations and improving its performance consistency, the results have been mixed so far. Despite the car’s improved reliability, with both cars finishing the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the team’s best result of the season has been an eighth-place finish at the São Paulo round.
Peugeot’s technical director, Olivier Jansonnie, acknowledged that the team has been missing outright pace and has struggled to extract the full potential of the upgraded 9X8.
“We are looking at the performance of the car right now, obviously until you find something [major] it’s always difficult to know what to improve,” Jansonnie told reporters at WEC Fuji.
“We are looking at various things: we have evaluated and started to pinpoint so many things on the car that need improvement – especially the last two races were quite relevant for that.
“Part of that is for sure set-up, which we can cure, and once we have a clear picture of what we cannot cure with set-up, we will have to look at evo jokers eventually.
“Only once you start getting to the point you can see what you are missing and when it’s to evolve in terms of technical package, jokers and homologation.”
Jansonnie also revealed further upgrades for the Peugeot 9X8 LMH, which could be introduced as early as the start of the 2025 WEC season.
“It’s open again,” he added. “We are looking hard into what could bring us performance. So depending upon the findings we do between now and the end of the year, we will decide what we do.
The team has already invoked the first of the five evo jokers performance upgrades allowed under the initial five-year lifecycle of their hypercar ahead of the 2024 campaign.
However, it is unknown how much of its allocation has been used as the series rule-makers do not share information on the use of evo Jokers with the manufacturers.
It’s also unknown if the 2024 makeover’s main feature to change from equal-sized wheels and tires on all sides to run narrower front wheels and bigger rears counts as an allocation.
When questioned whether Peugeot would make minor adjustments to the car or introduce more significant upgrades, Jansonnie remained reticent regarding the extent of the changes.
“It’s impossible to tell until we have the full picture,” he said. “It has to be some balance between how long we can wait before doing something and how much you can gain from doing something quickly.
“It depends on what we find on track in next month’s test. You have some quick and easy things that you can design in a couple of weeks, produce the parts in three to four weeks and test them, if you are 100 per cent sure what you are doing.
“That’s a two, three-month turnaround. There are other options that could be much longer. It’s impossible to answer.”
Jansonnie also remained adamant that introducing the Peugeot 9X8 LMH at Imola was the right thing to do when asked if he would have done anything differently.
“I still believe that at Le Mans, the new car was a bit quicker,” he said. “We were in the ‘corner’ of the Balance of Performance with the old car [meaning running with the minimum weight and maximum power].
“We couldn’t introduce the new car earlier. Ideally we would have done at Qatar but we couldn’t do it, for scheduling and timing reasons.
“I think trying to get the car on track as soon as we could was still the best option, because it’s taking time to reach the potential of this car. If we had delayed the introduction of the car, we would have achieved that even later.”
The decision to pursue further upgrades for the Peugeot 9X8 LMH comes as no surprise, given the team’s frustrations with the car’s performance and the desire to close the gap to the front-running Porsches, Ferraris, and Toyotas.
Despite the challenges, Peugeot remains committed to developing the 9X8 and is confident that the upcoming upgrades will help the team become more competitive in the 2025 WEC season.
The team has been testing the car at various circuits, including the Circuit of the Americas (COTA) ahead of the Lone Star Le Mans round, and has also participated in a Michelin tyre test focused on the new Hypercar compounds that were originally scheduled to debut in 2025 WEC but delayed to 2026.
