Bye Bye Bourdais

A photographer related a story from the Champ Car event at Portland this year, where he was snapping off shots of the Newman/Haas/Lanigan Racing crew in pitlane during Friday morning practice.

Sebastien Bourdais pulled in, lifted his visor and immediately started complaining about his car - it didn't turn in, it drifted away from the apex, couldn't get its power down on exit. In short, it was impossible to drive.

Said photographer looked up at the timing monitors; Bourdais had just set the third fastest lap of the session.

I relayed this anecdote to one of his rivals just this last weekend at Road America, and he chuckled.

"Ha! That's typical Sebastien," he replied. "You listen to him after a race and you'd think his car was broken - and then you remember how he pulled away from you at a second a lap or won by half a minute. It must be really hard to have those kind of problems, huh?"

And it's for this reason that over the last few seasons, it's become a tradition for the regular Champ Car journalists on the Saturday night before a race to click drinks and raise them 'to A-B-B' - Anyone But Bourdais.

It only works half the time: Sebastien has won 25 of the last 51 Champ Car races, bringing his total to an astounding 28 in just under five seasons.

I always feel a pang of guilt at this ABB business because I actually think Sebastien is an OK guy.

I like the fact that he always praises his team and acknowledges how good they are. I like the fact that he speaks of his wife Claire with genuine love, not the sappiness that makes listeners feel uncomfortable, nor the pre-programmed 'loyalty' that reeks of insincerity. And I like the fact that he will say what he thinks.

But there are times and places to say what you think, and Sebastien's not too hot at deciding when's best. To have erupted from his car at Mont-Tremblant and berated Robert Doornbos' 'F1-style' blocking tactics over the public address system only confirmed the image of him being a whinger.

When I asked him why he hadn't just gone to see Tony Cotman [Champ Car's Executive VP of Operations, and decision maker in Race Control] about it, he said: "Because there's no point. If he didn't see it then, there's nothing he can do now to change the result."

But by the same token, nothing Bourdais said in the post-race interview was going to change anything either, so why bother?

That's not to say his opinion was incorrect - Doornbos did edge Bourdais towards the grass on lap 51 of the Canadian race. But why the Frenchman have to express his displeasure so publicly and have the Quebecois jeering him?

He misjudged the mood at Portland last year, too, where AJ Allmendinger dominated to score his first Champ Car victory.

Bourdais, starting third, was wrong-footed by pole-sitting teammate Bruno Junqueira's misunderstanding with the starter, and finished lap one in seventh place.

By the end of the race Sebastien was still furious, but rather than say, 'Well, I was compromised from the start by my teammate falling asleep at the wrong moment', he instead launched into a tirade about Champ Car being anti-Newman/Haas.

Coming off the back of four back-to-back victories, this came across as an extremely petulant over-reaction, which immediately took the shine off his own performance. The way he had channelled his anger in the car had been pretty special to behold, and earned him 'driver of the day' in my book.

But there are many other more obvious examples of him outshining his rivals. There's Denver 2004, where he got knocked into a lap one spin by teammate Junqueira, but came steaming back through the field to win, even having the spare mental capacity to flick Bruno the bird as he went past!

There's the fantastic comeback and pass at Mexico City last year to score Lola's final Champ Car win. And last weekend, of course, he made everyone else look like they were still driving a Lola as he whipped them comprehensively at Road America.

Normally I don't like to see a driver dominate a race, or at least, not when it's a driver who has achieved so much success that you go to a race expecting him to win.

But last week, I felt exhilarated for Bourdais: he was so clearly the class of the field, and he should have won this race twice before. Anything other than a Bourdais win would have been a miscarriage of justice.

But for the sake of reporting an event, if it's going to be a Bourdais win, I'd far rather tell of how he had to fight for it (Long Beach 2005 or Monterrey '06 are particularly fine examples) rather than 'the best driver is in the best car and night follows day'.

And winning good hard fights tends to bring out the best in Sebastien in post-race press conferences. If he feels he has been robbed by circumstances, though, Bourdais finds it hard to handle.

I have no doubt that this is because he's a perfectionist, and he's well aware that, given the tools he has at his disposal, there is a huge expectation from within the team, the media, the public and himself.

But the foundation of the problem is that he has never, it seems, come to accept that luck plays a huge part in motor racing.

This is not like athletics, or tennis, or golf, where if the star gets it right - or at least does the job better than all rivals - then he or she wins.

In motorsport, a pitstop can go wrong, something on the car can go wrong, a strategy can be ruined by an unfortunately timed full-course caution, an incompetent backmarker can drive into you, and so on.

One understands his frustration, of course. At the two races this year unaffected by full course caution periods - Portland and Elkhart Lake (the latter's yellow period was only the first two laps) - he simply blew everyone away.

But he knows that yellow-free races are rare, and having the best crew and the best car also puts him in the best position to overcome any bad luck that might fall his way.

And that's the point. In a season where he wins 7 out of 15 races, Bourdais can usually point to at least four more that he should have won but for bad luck. Fair enough.

But his payback in good fortune is that he's been with the best team in the paddock since he arrived in Champ Car, he's virtually guaranteed a good car when he hits any given track, and it's rare that he has wring a car by its neck to get a decent lap time.

Put another way, in terms of equipment and environment, Bourdais has never been consistently at a disadvantage to any of his rivals. I'm not saying he doesn't deserve it: the best deserves the best.

But you'd hope that at least in front of the media and public he'd have learned to roll with the punches, even if he went home and kicked the cat.

And the annoying thing is, in private, away from the microphone, he can be charming - and modest.

I ran into him at Cleveland airport this year, and after his bitching about Tracy winning the race despite colliding with two cars (yes, Sebastien still has a blind spot as far as that particular rivalry is concerned!), we got to talking about Formula 1 and how if the STR deal didn't pan out, whether he had a chance at BMW.

That inevitably led onto discussion of Timo Glock, who won Champ Car's rookie of the year title in 2005, but who for the last two seasons has raced in GP2, and is in strong contention for the title this year.

I remarked to Bourdais that I believed Glock was the biggest loss to Champ Car in the last five years, and that had they ever been paired at Newman/Haas/Lanigan, it would have been anyone's guess as to who would have prevailed. "Yeah," said Sebastien. "Actually, I thought the same."

And I recall some four and a half years ago, I asked him the question I like to ask all drivers - 'Have you ever encountered a rival who you had to acknowledge was just that little bit too talented for you to handle?'

And it took him only a few seconds to cite Sebastien Enjolras, the French Formula 3 star who was killed in a sportscar at Le Mans in 1997, as one such. Trust me, it's rare that any driver acknowledges the superiority of another.

Having said that, Tracy, the only driver to have beaten Bourdais to a Champ Car title, is quick to acknowledge his talent as well as his, erm, 'special' personality.

"He's a super talented driver," said PT at Edmonton. "There's no question of his ability to bring his team around him and get the best from them, himself and his car.

"His drawback is his personality. He rubs people up the wrong way, be it fans or competitors - rival drivers, rival team managers. I understand that he's a perfectionist, but you've gotta try and be a good winner and a good loser.

"And he's often not happy even when he wins. He's always got something to complain about. So if he doesn't win it's triple misery!

"That's the only flaw I can see in him, though. His ability to qualify a car, his ability to get the laps out of a car when he needs to in qualifying or race is as good as anyone I've ever seen in this series, so we're talking Mansell, Mears, Montoya, Unser, Andretti.

"If he had been prepared to take the Renault F1 opportunity and played Flavio Briatore's game, maybe he could have been a double F1 world champion by now."

At the same race I spoke to Kenny Siwieck, assistant team manager at Newman/Haas/Lanigan Racing, and the man who talks to Bourdais throughout the race, relaying strategy, lap times, etc, worked out with Bourdais' race engineer Craig Hampson.

I admit, I expected to hear of deep admiration and respect, but not a whole lotta love. I couldn't have been more wrong.

"Sebastien is so talented and it's a pleasure to work with someone like that," said Kenny.

"He is a huge part of the team's success because he is a true champion and a professional, and he appreciates everyone else on the team. He's one of the best I've ever worked with. He's gonna be missed because he makes us look so damn good! He gives 120 per cent and he expects that in return.

"The downside of that is if you let him down, you're disgusted with yourself and he will tell you that you screwed up. And that's the trade-off when you have a team relationship like that: you have to be honest with each other. And then the next win feels sweeter.

"It's like after you and your woman are arguing and scratching each other's eyes out - the 'let's-make-up' sex afterwards is fantastic!

"From the time he came here he was special. He was down at Sebring for his first test with us in the winter of 2002, and we didn't even know who this guy was who was helping us put up our awnings. Turns out he's the guy we're running the test for!

"Fortunately it only took us a year, 2003, to integrate, and then the following year we hit the ground running and we've been winning ever since.

"He is a true gentleman who has always treated me with respect, and you would get the same opinion from every one of our guys in the organisation - from Paul [Newman] and Carl [Haas] to the truck drivers and to the people at the workshop. He's been gracious, open, warm, sincere.

"He'll truly be missed here. Truthfully, I love him like a brother and I wish him the best of luck in F1. That's from the heart... I'm sorry, we better stop the tape. I'm choking up here..."

That's the legacy Bourdais leaves those in Champ Car who really know him, then, so it's a real regret that that side of him did not shine through more often to inspire the media and the public.

Of course, that dearth of support is partly because of the motorsport world's puerile denigration of all things connected with France, other than its food and its capital city.

But mostly it's because the perception of Sebastien in Champ Car has been a genius badass in the cockpit, while an uncongenial pain in the ass outside it.

The irony, of course, is that everyone involved in Champ Car, from Paul Tracy down, will be rooting for Sebastien Bourdais from round one of the Formula One World Championship next year.

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- The Autosport.com Team

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