Paul-Loup, you finished in fifth place in these 8 Hours of Bahrain. What are your feelings?
The team has done a very good job all season. The objective was fourth place in the Manufacturers' championship. It came down to me and the BMW in the end. I had to overtake her to get this place, that's what we managed to do. I'm very happy for the whole team, it's a great way to end the year. We said yesterday (Friday) that we had worked a lot for the race. It was a winning bet. The start was a little complicated, it was much warmer than we thought, but our strategy paid off in the second part of the race. When I get in the car during the Virtual Safety Car, we are twelfth. I finally moved up to fifth. Personally, it's great, but we think as a team. Ferdinand (Habsburg) did a great job, Charles (Milesi) too, Jules (Gounon) too, and it paid off in the end with this fourth place in the championship. We can be proud. We always want more and starting tomorrow (Sunday) we will change our mindset to work even harder for 2025.
Did you believe in the podium at the end of the race?
I'm seventh when I take my last stint, I see third at the back, but that wasn't the goal. The goal was to gradually get back on the BMW and succeed in overtaking it to secure the place in the championship. There were about seven laps remaining when I came back to the fourth (Mikkel Jensen in the #93 Peugeot), but by then the third (Antonio Giovinazzi in the #51 Ferrari) had flown away. There weren't too many possibilities left to get that fifth place. Being fourth or fifth was no longer important once we had secured the championship place. I was asked to reduce the pace on the last laps to take no risks and be sure not to have any problems. I saw the podium, but the important thing was elsewhere.
Fourteenth in qualifying, fifth in the race. Was it the objective from the start of the weekend to maximize the race?
We knew the key would be tire degradation. The championship is very tough and everyone was unanimous in saying that since the start of the year, qualification was now extremely important in the WEC. This is obviously the case, but perhaps less so in Bahrain. Here, there is so much tire damage that we can talk about seconds difference on the second part of a stint. From there, the difference will quickly disappear whether you start fourth or fifth. It was our bet, which paid off. Racing facts also worked in our favor. We can always do better, but overall we produced a good copy, without any errors. We started the season in Qatar with an error-free seventh place, we finished the season with an error-free fifth place. This is the key to being able to fight while avoiding traps.
We were able to notice in this race, like the previous ones, that the Alpines systematically stop later than the others. What is the idea?
Delaying the stop allows us to open up the strategy and be aggressive on the last stint. To be honest, we have a car that runs well while saving gas. If we want to push more, we will consume more without going particularly faster. We pilots have all worked on this, and we all do lift and coast. Which saves a little energy each lap and allows us on each relay to do one more lap than the others. If we push more, we could do one lap less, but without any performance gain. This is something we have to work on, because next season we will have to be able to push more at certain times. Sometimes you have to know how to maximize your weak points.
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