What could have been: When an Indycar champion almost got stuck in a DTM dead-end

Sebastien Bourdais and Newman-Haas Racing were an unstoppable force in Indycar racing prior to the Frenchman taking up a long-awaited Formula 1 opportunity with Toro Rosso for 2008. After impressing in his 2003 Champ Car rookie season, taking pole on his debut and winning three times, he romped to four consecutive titles between 2004 and 2007, amassing a further 28 victories on the way.

But in a parallel reality that very nearly happened, Bourdais never sat in the Lola B2/00. He instead spent 2003 in the DTM with Opel – a marque that was fighting a losing battle to remain competitive, for all the star talents it managed to attract to Russelheim.

In the final year of the Astra Coupe, the updated 2003 car toiled against Peter Dumbreck’s year-old machine. The Scot tallied more points than all other Opel drivers combined and scored its best result with second at Lausitz. “I just had a better front-end than the newer cars,” he recalled in 2020 to this writer.

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A pitstop fumble denied Timo Scheider and Opel its best win chance at Zandvoort, and when the new Vectra came for 2004 all pretence of it being a frontrunner disappeared entirely. So it likely wouldn’t have been an environment where Bourdais would have thrived, although he did showcase his touring car prowess a decade later in Australian Supercars. Together with Jamie Whincup in the Triple Eight Holden, he won the Gold Coast 600 at Surfers Paradise in 2011 and 2012.

Bourdais had claimed the 2002 Formula 3000 championship for the Super Nova team owned by his manager, David Sears – albeit after Arden rival Tomas Enge was docked the 10 points he’d earned for victory at the Hungaroring when he failed a random drugs test. But he had known for several months that his prospects of graduating to F1 for 2003 were slim, irrespective of the outcome.

Although his F3000 Lola was adorned in Renault colours in 2002, the result of the FFSA mobilising support behind the driver it believed most likely to race in F1 and convincing the French carmaker to stump up, relations between Bourdais and Renault F1 boss Flavio Briatore were frosty after the young gun had turned down a management contract that he says provided no assurances about any future race seat.

Bourdais won the 2002 F3000 title in Renault colours, but a move to its F1 team was never on the cards

Photo by: Lorenzo Bellanca / Motorsport Images

“Once you’ve said no to FFBB and Flavio as the head-master, you’ve crucified yourself,” explains Bourdais, today part of Cadillac’s GTP operation in the IMSA SportsCar Championship.

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His best chance therefore lay with Arrows, who had been impressed by Bourdais after a two-day test at Valencia where he’d lapped just 0.7s shy of team leader Heinz-Harald Frentzen. Team boss Tom Walkinshaw pledged to run him again later in the year, but it never materialised when the team collapsed.

“I knew I wasn’t going to have an opportunity at Renault, so when Arrows fell through, we didn’t have any other options,” he says.

"David [Sears] did really good for me, because he had put an exit clause for F1 or Champ Cars and [IRL] Indycar and that allowed me to take the Newman/Haas opportunity" Sebastien Bourdais

A move to the DTM therefore seemed like a sensible one – if not one that would be a fitting reward for the driver who had claimed five poles from the first six races of the F3000 campaign and utterly dominated on the streets of Monaco to win by 18 seconds.

“The path was ‘sorry bud, but you’re going to end up in cars with roofs and doors’,” Bourdais recalls. “I was still going to make a living out of it, which was better than a kick in the butt, but my F1 aspirations at that point were kind of gone.

“So I had to go with Volker Strycek in the Opel DTM programme. I had a test there, they really liked me and they signed me.”

But Sears had crucially inserted a clause in the contract Bourdais signed with Strycek, allowing him to exit the deal in the event of interest from an F1 or Indycar team in Champ Car or the then all-oval Indy Racing League.

Fate could have seen Bourdais compete for Opel in the DTM, but it was an uncompetitive prospect in 2003

Photo by: Sutton Images

Sears also managed Bruno Junqueira, the 2000 F3000 champion with his Petrobras-backed outfit, who had finished second in the 2002 CART Indycar standings for Chip Ganassi Racing and moved to join NHR for 2003. The team co-owned by Paul Newman and Carl Haas needed an all-new line-up, with champion Cristiano da Matta joining Toyota in Formula 1 and Christian Fittipaldi making an ill-fated switch to NASCAR, so still had a second seat to fill.

On the recommendation of Sears, when Justin Wilson elected to focus on securing an F1 seat with Minardi and pulled out of a test at Sebring, Bourdais was invited to join ex-BAR and Jordan F1 racer Ricardo Zonta (another F3000 champion run by Sears in 1997) and showed enough to earn himself a drive.

That was all he needed to get out of the Opel deal, even if it did mean a significant pay cut.

“David did really good for me, because he had put an exit clause for F1 or Champ Cars and [IRL] Indycar and that allowed me to take the Newman/Haas opportunity,” he says. “But funny enough, I had a €250,000 deal with Opel and then I turned it down to go and drive for Carl and Paul for $70,000!”

One suspects it was worth it though…