Jean-Marc Finot, the French manufacturer’s motorsport boss, said that the in-house Peugeot Sport team was “improving but not by enough” after Mikkel Jensen and Loic Duval ended up outside the top eight cars that have gone through to final qualifying.
Peugeot will be the only one of the five major car makers participating in the World Endurance Championship's Hypercar class not to be present in the Hyperpole session on Thursday evening for this weekend’s double-points round.
“We have been progressing race by race, but we are still not at the pace we were expecting,” said Finot.
“We have to do better to catch up to the front-runners.
Jensen ended up tenth in Wednesday evening's qualifying session with a 3m27.546s, which was 2.3s off the pace of Antonio Fuoco’s Ferrari 499P at the top of the timesheets.
Duval was three-tenths behind his team-mate on 3m27.850s in 11th position in the one-hour session.
Finot insisted that represented an improvement on Peugeot’s performance last time out in the WEC at Spa at the end of April
“At Spa, we were two seconds off out of two minutes and here we are two seconds over three and a half minutes, so we are improving,” he said.
Source: Autosport