Bourdais feared car problems

With the fastest time in each of the qualifying sessions, Bourdais took a maximum points score from his Long Beach weekend. He also led 74 of the race's 78 laps and secured the fastest lap too.

However, while Bourdais was running alone out front for virtually the entire race, the Frenchman admitted that he continued to think of what potential problems could ruin his 17th career Champ Car victory.

"It's like, 'What is going to go wrong?'," Bourdais said. "It's been like that all weekend. I kept saying, 'This thing is going way too well.' I'm panicking at some points.

"I've been in this situation many, many times before. Trust me, so many things can go wrong during a race, especially here, with a season-opener like that, on a street course. I just couldn't stop myself from thinking, 'Oh, God, what's going to go wrong today?'

"I was not worried at all about our performance level or anything like that, I was just worried of a mechanical failure, or a problem in the pits. I'm not perfect. I can make mistakes, too. I'm just glad everything went right and we scored the maximum points. It's been a smooth weekend all the way through."

A warning light came on Bourdais' dashboard during the race, which made him believe his engine was about to expire.

"I felt like at some point the engine didn't sound right," he added. "It was delivering the power, but it didn't sound the same. Maybe I was just getting completely crazy in the car waiting for something to break.

"No, we had the pop-up valve light which usually signals a pop-up valve problem or that it's going crazy. We were lucky the pop-up valve was not doing anything."