SURFERS PARADISE, Australia — Champ Car introduced a new spec chassis and strict development and testing rules in 2007, in part to try to slow down Sebastien Bourdais and Newman/Haas/Lanigan Racing.
They didn’t work. The brilliant Frenchman won the Lexmark Indy 300 in Surfers Paradise, Australia for his seventh victory in 13 starts this year. Those gaudy stats allowed Bourdais to clinch a record fourth consecutive Champ Car series championship with one race remaining in the 2007 season.
“For the McDonald’s team to win the race, win the championship, and be the first repeat winner in Surfers — what a day!” Bourdais exclaimed. “It was one of those races where I decided to have fun with it and give it all we had.
“These have been the best racing years of my life,” he added. “We’ve had an awesome stretch of years here and really enjoyed it. And 2007 is definitely a year to be remembered by me.”
The native of the historic racing town of Le Mans has dominated the Champ Car series since he surprised everyone by taking pole position for his first race at St. Petersburg in 2003. Bourdais showed it wasn’t a fluke by repeating as pole winner for the next race in Monterrey, Mexico, and he won in his fifth start at Brands Hatch, England.
He didn’t win the championship as a rookie, but he has every year since.
The man nicknamed ‘Sea-Bass’ has won 30 of his 72 Champ Car starts.
As a point of comparison, Bruno Junqueira joined Newman/Haas at the same time as Bourdais — at the start of the 2003 season, as the presumed number one to the unheralded French rookie.
Junqueira drove a great race in Australia, finishing third for Dale Coyne Racing to earn his 34th podium from 100 Champ Car starts.
With nine poles, eight wins and three runner-up finishes in the championship since 2001, ‘Junky’ has crafted a pretty solid career in Champ Cars. But like everyone else, he’s pretty much run second to Bourdais over the last five years.
The bad rap on ‘Sea-Bass’ is that his success has come at a time when the Champ Car series is in a state of decline, with slim 17 or 18 car fields and far less depth than in the formula’s glory days, whether you believe those to be the 1930s, the 1960s or the 1990s.
There’s a pretty slim thread linking Bourdais and today’s version of Champ Car racing with other great multiple champions over the years ranging from Ted Horn to Mario Andretti to Rick Mears.
Yet you get the impression that Bourdais would have been competitive in any era against anyone. He’s won races easily from the front and he’s earned them by charging from the back or perfectly executing NHLR’s superior strategy. In summation, he’s as well-rounded as any driver coming out of Champ Cars in the last 20 years.
“Sebastien is the best driver out there, and without him, none of this would have happened,” observed Craig Hampson, Bourdais’s chief engineer for the last five years. “Not only is he fast (so) he can qualify well and make the passes on the race track, it’s also his feedback and feel for the car that guides the development. I think things have come together very nicely for us.”
No matter how his move to Formula One next year with Scuderia Toro Rosso pans out, Bourdais will always have a golden era of his career to look back on. Modern Champ Car racing has been dominated in two-year increments, but never over the course of four-plus seasons.
“It’s just the success of an awesome group of people within the McDonald’s team,” Bourdais remarked. “We started that relationship back in 2003 and all the results really speak for themselves. It (shows) how good these guys are. They proved it today again when we came in the pits in third and came out first. From there, it was in my hands to try to make it stick.
“What a fun five years it’s been,” he added. “I’m surely not going to forget about it any time soon. We’ve been working really hard together, as I said, for these past five years and I just couldn’t stand myself if I didn’t give it all I had until the very end. Obviously to win that championship with a win today means a lot. 
“At least we’ll be in a mood to celebrate and have a great party.”