TO HEAR WHAT MINASSIAN HAS TO SAY ABOUT THE FORTHCOMING CAMPAIGN,
CLICK HERE
Driving for Peugeot is a dream come true. There is no better place for me to be. The best seats at the moment are at Peugeot and Audi, and I’m really happy to be with Peugeot. I’m sure this year I’m going to have a shot at winning Le Mans – it’s never written that you’re going to win it, but at least I’m in a position to fight for it. It’s just perfect.
The Peugeot 908 HDi FAP was born really well. There was immediately a lot of pace in the car, which we showed in qualifying at Le Mans last year by setting pole position, but in the race we couldn’t push so hard because the car wouldn’t have lasted the distance. What we learned was that we had to work very, very hard to make the car as reliable as possible so that we can push as hard as we did in qualifying in the race too. Le Mans now is becoming more like a 24-hour sprint than a race to the end.
It was hard to have to retire close to the end last year, but at the same time it was one of those things. We had never run the car for 24 hours before the race, but since then we’ve done several 24-hour tests to try and make the car reliable. The problem was we weren’t sure the engine was going to last, but when you get to just two hours from the end of the race and you’re in the car, in second place and several laps ahead of the third-placed car, it was a bit sad. It’s a killer of a race.
Since then our winter testing programme has gone really well. Last year obviously we had some reliability problems with the car, which was normal for the first year. The priority therefore was to make the car reliable and we worked all year-long to do that. Now the car is getting more reliable by the day, meaning we can start to explore its potential a bit more. We’re getting more speed out of it and discovering more about the car all the time.
![Nicolas Minassian - Peugeot Sport [Pic credit: Peugeot Sport]](http://pix.crash.net/thumbs/283729.jpg)
