Sébastien Bourdais insists he is not at all concerned about speculation his
Formula 1 seat at
Scuderia Toro Rosso may be under threat, underlining that he is ‘giving his best' despite having not scored since the opening race of the 2008 campaign.
The Frenchman came into the top flight with a bang – more than five years on from his first taste of
F1 machinery with Renault back at the end of 2002 – by running up in fourth place on his grand prix debut in Melbourne, expertly fending off the advances of no less than defending world champion
Kimi Raikkonen in the
Ferrari,
Renault's double title-winner
Fernando Alonso and the McLaren-Mercedes of race-winner
Lewis Hamilton's team-mate
Heikki Kovalainen in the closing stages – until his driveshaft cruelly let him down just three laps from home, leaving him classified seventh at the finish line.
“It was very sad for the boys,” Bourdais acknowledged, speaking exclusively to
Crash.net, “when you get so close to it. It was still great, because we got two points in the first grand prix, so that made us feel a bit better about it, but it's always a bit disappointing when you know you could have finished fourth in your first-ever grand prix and scored five points straightaway. Like I said many times, the race made us more than we made the race – we didn't put a wheel wrong all weekend and that paid off.”
That much is true, but since then it has been far from plain sailing for the 29-year-old, with four failures to finish from the following seven grands prix and a best result of 13th place in the ones in which he did see the chequered flag. That compares to the five points scored by fellow ‘rookie' team-mate and namesake
Sebastian Vettel, and the record-breaking four-time Champ Car king admitted the cross-over from the Atlantic was still taking some getting used to.
