EDMONTON, Alberta — Championship points have been harder to come by than usual for Sebastien Bourdais in 2007. So, the three-time Champ Car World Series champion decided to go after every one available at the Grand Prix Edmonton.
With the race already well in hand, Bourdais stopped cruising and repeatedly smashed the lap record in the closing stages in an effort to secure the championship point for the fastest race lap. The 93rd of his 96 laps was almost 0.9-second better than anyone else in the 17-car field could manage.
It all added up to a 3.947-second victory over Justin Wilson, the 27th race victory of Bourdais’s impressive Champ Car career. Rookie Graham Rahal was third in a second Newman-Haas-Lanigan Racing entry.
More importantly, Bourdais put himself back at the top of the championship standings after briefly dropping to third. He ends Champ Car’s three-race Canadian swing 20 points ahead of incoming leader Robert Doornbos and 24 points up on Edmonton pole winner Will Power.

Sebastien Bourdais (Champ Car Photo)

While both of his chief championship rivals had races to forget — Doornbos was crashed out by the lapped car of Alex Tagliani, and Power retired after the steering seized on his Team Australia Panoz DP01 — Bourdais had his recent run of bad fortune turn around.
“It’s a great win,” Bourdais said after averaging a record 107.517 miles per hour. “We needed a great team effort because it was hard today. We had a bobble in the pits with Katherine (Legge), so it wasn’t automatic. But we overcame that, and it was an awesome job from everybody from the McDonald’s team. We stuck together and said, ‘It’s not over.’ We kept plugging away, and it worked out.
“I couldn’t be any happier.”
From a clean track on the outside of the front row, Bourdais grabbed the lead at the start but lost it during the first round of yellow-flag pit stops when he had to be held in his pit box until backmarker Legge moved past.
But in vintage style, he stretched his second 32-gallon load of fuel until lap 52, two laps longer than Wilson and a full three laps more than pole man Power. In less than four minutes, third place was transformed into a four-second lead over Wilson.
Bourdais turned up the wick late in the race to secure the fastest-lap bonus point.
“Craig (Hampson, engineer) said on the radio that we had it by about half a second, so I was just cruising around for eight or 10 laps,” Bourdais explained.

BEHIND THE EARS: The top three finishers in Sunday's Champ Car race shower each other in champagne. (Champ Car Photo)

“Then I saw Justin coming back a bit and I thought if he pulls a flyer in the last couple of laps, it would be a  shame to lose it.
“So, I pushed hard for a couple laps, but I didn’t want to push too hard either,” he continued. “It was a compromise. You want to get every point, but you don’t want to risk it all and lose the win.”
Wilson and Rahal managed to lap in the 59.5-second bracket late in the race. But Bourdais finally set the standard with a 58.653.
“I’m just pleased to get a good run in, and it means a lot to move up in the championship, though unfortunately Sebastien has pulled away from me slightly,” said Wilson. “We showed again this year that we know what it takes to go quick around here.”
Rahal ran with the leaders all day and was a full 18 seconds clear of fourth-place finisher Simon Pagenaud at the checkered flag. Canadian hero Paul Tracy was fifth.
“I thought we had a good enough car to get by Justin, but at the end there just couldn't quite hang in,” Rahal remarked.
“Still, it’s a good result to be in third.”