We took part in the Sebring 12 Hours last month, our first racing outing of the year. The American Le Mans Series is very competitive, and I didn’t know Sebring – I had only been there to do a small portion of the track before with Champ Car, so there were a few corners that I needed to learn. The track is so bumpy, and Sebring is such a special place. Just for the engineers and the drivers to get some feedback during the pre-race test was very useful, and it was very good to go there first.
For my team-mate Stéphane Sarrazin personally, it was maybe a little bit frustrating at the time to be deprived of pole position because of an incident involving another car during the final qualifying session, but we all knew we had effectively got pole. Even if it won’t go down in the record books that we were on pole, everybody at the track knew we were on pole. We were the fastest car all week in nearly every session, and we proved that in the race as well, so not starting from pole wasn’t too much of a big deal.
The first two hours of the race were very good, because we had I think about a 37-second lead over the first of the Audis and everything was going fine, but then we had some hydraulic problems. We went there with a few new systems on the car which we knew weren’t 100 per cent reliable, so we knew we were maybe going to have some problems and when we did it wasn’t too much of a big surprise.
It’s frustrating in one way for the drivers because we always want to win, but on the other hand it was good that the problems happened then and not at Le Mans. Peugeot are just concentrating on Le Mans – that’s all they want – and they went to Sebring because it has a rough surface and is a difficult place to race at. We found some weak points on the car, so after that Peugeot could bring the car back and work on them.
![Nicolas Minassian - Peugeot Sport [Pic credit: Peugeot Sport]](http://pix.crash.net/thumbs/283729.jpg)
