For the past four years, Sebastien Bourdais was the king of Champ Car racing.
Driving for the powerful Newman/Haas/Lanigan Racing team, Bourdais dominated the now-defunct American open-wheel series like it had never been dominated before, winning 28 of 55 races on the way to an unprecedented four consecutive series championships.
Now, the 29-year-old Frenchman is spending his time at or near the rear of the Formula One grid racing for Scuderia Toro Rosso.
Last weekend at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve in Montreal, Bourdais hit the wall in practice, broke his gearbox and had to start from the rear of the field in Sunday’s Canadian Grand Prix. He spun in the race and finished a lap behind the leaders in 13th place.
And that was his second-best result of the season.
“It’s quite different, obviously,” Bourdais said before getting on the track in Canada. “We moved and we don’t contend for wins any more. But it’s been quite enjoyable. A lot of things to discover and reset, but so far, so good.”
Despite being rather old for an F1 rookie and going with a year-old team that was unlikely to contend for anything, Bourdais was excited to get started this season. And it all looked so promising after he earned his first two F1 points with a seventh-place finish in the opener at Melbourne, Australia.
Since then, though, it’s been a blur of bad luck and bad racing.
Until Sunday, Bourdais had failed to finish four of his last five starts and had only a 15th-place finish in Bahrain to show for that stretch.
“We had obviously a much better start than we hoped for and then maybe not as good a few races after, until now,” he said.
“Hopefully, it’s going to take a sharp turn for better luck, but it’s been everything we kind of expected.”
At least part of the problem has been that the Toro Rosso team was still competing with last year’s car. They finally took delivery of a new model last month at Monaco. Bourdais is hoping to improve on his results — perhaps as soon as next week in the French Grand Prix at Magny Cours.
“We were losing performance compared to the others with the old car,” he said. “Now we are, hopefully, on the steep learning curve with the new car and going to make progress. We know the new car is faster, for sure. It’s just about trying to get it right and put everything together.
“Personally, I think it’s going to head the right direction.”
Still, Bourdais knows he isn’t likely to be challenging for wins any time soon. After his successes in Champ Car, you might think he is hanging his head.
You would be wrong.
“It doesn’t matter what you’re fighting for,” Bourdais said, a smile lighting up his face. “You’re just doing your job and doing the best you can and then you end up where you end up.”
With so much disparity among the F1 teams in resources and talent, it’s not always easy assess the abilities of drivers racing for teams at the bottom of the grid.
Patrick Head, engineering director for the Williams F1 team and a longtime observer of the sport, likes what he has seen of Bourdais.
“Like a lot of things, you’ve got to get everything working together,” Head noted. “One’s also got to remember that up until Monaco they were running last year’s car, albeit with some development. I think he well justifies his place in Formula One and I quite expect to see him starting putting results together soon.”
Bourdais always believed it was his destiny to race in F1. It’s just that he expected to get there a lot earlier.
Growing up in the little town of Le Mans, Bourdais was fascinated by the 24-hour sports car race that took place near his home. But the youngster was far more taken with the speed, glamour and lure of F1.
It appeared for a while his dream would soon be answered when he won races and championships on the lower rungs of the European racing ladder, drawing plenty of attention from F1 teams.
In 2002, at the age of 22, he had a successful test with Renault, one of the better teams in the Grand Prix sport. In the end, though, Renault team boss Flavio Briatore chose another Frenchman, Franck Montagny, as its test driver for 2003, instead of Bourdais.
So Bourdais packed his bags and moved to the United States, taking a shot at Champ Car — then known as CART.
Before beginning his string of championships, he was rookie of the year in 2003, winning three races.
It was a great disappointment when he was shut out of F1 early in his career, but Bourdais insists he has no regrets about spending those five years in America. And he couldn’t be happier that he now gets to live his dream as a non-contender.
“For me, it was always very clear (that) it’s trying to enjoy yourself which is the first target,” Bourdais said. “Give your best for yourself and for the team, especially. Then, if the car is only good enough for 15th and you finish 12th, sometimes it’s even more satisfying than just winning the race with a car that everybody knows is capable of winning.”
