LEEDS, Alabama – Sebastien Bourdais is off to a fast start to the 2015 Verizon IndyCar Series season and the four-time straight Champ Car Series champion looks to continue that hot start at Barber Motorsports Park in Sunday’s Honda Indy Grand Prix of Alabama.
Bourdais finished sixth in the season-opening Honda Grand Prix of St. Petersburg on March 29th. He was racing his way well into the top 10 before he was an innocent victim of the crash triggered by 2012 IndyCar Series champion and 2014 Indianapolis 500 winner Ryan Hunter-Reay and Team Penske’s Simon Pagenaud at NOLA Motorsports Park on April 12. Bourdais ended up finishing 21st but that placement doesn’t indicate how competitive his Hydroxycut-Team KVSH Chevrolet was running.
“If we get the result we were going to get in NOLA, it was still going to be a top-six at the end,” Bourdais said. “There is a lot to be satisfied with the start of the season.”
Bourdais started ninth and finished sixth in last Sunday’s 41st Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach after a late-race battle with Tony Kanaan, Pagenaud and Juan Pablo Montoya for third place thrilled the huge throng of fans that clamored to see the second-biggest race on the Verizon IndyCar Series schedule.
Bourdais was disappointed with his qualifying effort on Saturday so the team switched back to last year’s setup and it paid off in the race.
“We hit the re-set button big-time,” Bourdais said after the race. “It was a big recovery there. We tried to be a little creative with setup. It’s a shame we started back in ninth but we made our way up to a second top-six finish – should have been three, really. We are back on a roll and we to fight for the points.
“The enemy of good is better. We tried to make last year’s setup a little better than it was but we screwed the whole thing up because you saw how good we were at the end of the race with last year’s setup. If we had left it alone, who knows where we would have finished?”
What made the battle at the end of the race so good was it involved the most experienced drivers in the race who raced fiercely and cleanly.
“Nobody wants to make a fool of themselves and throw away strong points,” Bourdais said. “It was a four-way battle but when you are last in a four-car line you can’t do much with it. If you were second in line you might have a shot at it but Simon was going to be conservative racing against Juan.”
Bourdais also believes after the first two races were full of caution periods because of scattered debris from the Aero Kits after contact on the race track, the drivers are racing cleaner. At Long Beach, there was just one caution period for four laps and Bourdais expects that to continue at Barber Motorsports Park.
“I think everybody got the message from the series that if there was going to be contact the series was going to look at it differently and start hammering people,” Bourdais said. “The display we saw in the first two races was obviously pretty sad. It’s not the standard of racing IndyCar should be. At Long Beach it was a very good race, good hard racing with one-on-one battles – that’s the way it should be.”
This will be the fourth race that the Verizon IndyCar Series drivers will use the new Aero Kits and the confidence of how to race each other is increasing, according to Bourdais.
“I’ve always felt confident with the Aero Kits,” Bourdais said. “The problem is regardless of what we do to the cars it’s always going to be open-wheel so if you make contact with each other pieces are going to break and fall off. More pieces might fall off with the kit but it’s pieces falling off and pieces you have to retrieve and cause yellows. The problem with the first two races was people getting way too excited about it.”