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Peugeot: We were not gunning for pole

Le Mans pole-sitter Stephane Sarrazin and Peugeot team principal Serge Saulnier have claimed that they were not gunning all-out for a qualifying time, despite beating Audi to pole position by three quarters of a second with a late run in Thursday night's final qualifying session

Sarrazin appeared to be on a charge 35 minutes before the end, but missed pole at his first attempt when he came up behind Andre Lotterer's #14 Kolles Audi R10 at the Porsche Curves.

He immediately set off on another quick lap, but this time had to duck around Tom Kristensen in the #1 Audi R15 at Indianapolis and once again fell tantalisingly short of the top spot.

After pitting for new tyres, Sarrazin embarked on another quick run and a traffic-free lap enabled him to displace the #1 Audi by just over seven tenths of a second. But he insisted that Peugeot hadn't gone all-out to set pole.

"We set up the car for the race," said Sarrazin. "We just tried at the end to do a good time, but the most important thing was for Sebastien [Bourdais], Franck [Montagny] and me to be happy with the set-up. It's nice to start from pole, with less traffic and maybe less chance of mistake. We will see."

Saulnier added: "We didn't really chase the pole. At the end we planned to try the soft tyre for the night during the race, and apparently it works quite well - the performance of the car was there.

"But, seriously, we did not really try to chase the pole - we were working for the race. At the end we have the pole, but it was not the main objective."

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