Since his Champ Car debut at St Petersburg in February of 2003 with what was then Newman/Haas Racing,
Sebastien Bourdais has been the series’ man to beat.
He qualified on the pole at St. Pete, as he did at his second Champ Car race in Monterrey, Mexico the next month, and led both races before running into a series of problems, eventually brushing the wall and failing to finish either race.
“We knew we had a great group of guys and we were really fast straight off in St Pete,” Bourdais recalls. “We had that first pole and looked very strong. It’s not always been smooth but we always had that speed and it’s very comforting because when you know you’ve got the speed you know at some point it’s going to pay off. And I think that was all along what made it a little easier. Even when it was tough and wouldn’t materialise we knew we had the speed and it was gonna happen at some point.”
Bourdais scored his first Champ Car win in only his fourth start and went on to take six poles and score three wins in his rookie season. Then followed four superlative years and an all-time record for Champ or Indy Car racing of four consecutive championships.
Last year Bourdais tied Ted Horn’s half a century-old record. This year he stands alone as a four times in a row champion of American open-wheel racing and with one race to go in his Champ Car career with Newman/Haas/Lanigan, Bourdais’s remarkable record shows thirty wins from seventy-two starts plus twelve more podium finishes for a sixty percent score of podiums versus starts.
