Bourdais predicts battle to the wire

Bourdais' win moved him 31 points clear of Justin Wilson and 45 ahead of AJ Allmendinger in the championship race, with five rounds to go.

However, the Frenchman says he is still not comfortable about securing his third successive championship, even though he has nearly a race in hand in terms of a points lead.

"It won't be done until the very end probably, unless we can maintain over 35 points lead with two races to go," Bourdais said. "The only thing we need to do is keep on finishing and then we'll see.

"As you know, it's very hard to clinch the championship a race or two before the end. It's probably going to come down to the wire. I mean, Justin, you can see, even when he has a bad weekend, he manages to bounce back and from 12th finishes 3rd.

"Okay, this was probably a day that went well for him because things played out the right way. But, you know, still he's very strong and consistent. I know him very well. We've been kind of doing that for quite some time now.

"Even though A.J. has dropped some, we can't take him out of the equation. We'll see what happens. But we just got to keep on doing what we do: finish races, be fast, run mistake-free. If we can do that, we should have a pretty fair shot at it."