Bourdais wins IndyCar opener after late crash
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. – As he pulled down pit road late Sunday on the streets of St. Petersburg, about to begin celebrating his second victory in his adopted hometown in two years, the emotion overwhelmed him.
The road back to victory lane hasn’t been easy for Sebastien Bourdais. He just made it look that way.
To many of the tens of thousands of people who saw him slam viciously into the Indianapolis Motor Speedway wall during qualifying for last year’s Indianapolis 500, his career should have been over right then.
He should have walked away, thankful that after battering the barrier at more than 230 mph his injuries weren’t more serious than a broken pelvis and hip. He should count his blessings and go home to his family, they said. After all, he’s a four-time IndyCar champion and has nothing left to prove. Odds are he won’t even come back the same driver. He’ll be too rattled, too squeamish to ever tackle the dangers of the Verizon IndyCar Series with the reckless abandon required to succeed in the sport.
“You always get (those) questions from people,” the Dale Coyne Racing with Vasser-Sullivan driver said after overcoming an early flat tire to rack up the 37th victory of his career. “‘Is he going to be the same? Is he going to come back? Is he this? Is he that?’
“I really tried not to leave any room for uncertainty as far as what I was going to do … but it’s been bumpy. It’s been tough. … For myself but more for the people around me.”
But Bourdais has been defiant from the start.
Dale Coyne remembers visiting him in the hospital the day after the crash and hearing his driver definitively tell him he was going to be back in an Indy car for the series finale at Sonoma.
Coyne said we’ll see. His doctors told him to relax.
Bourdais didn’t listen, worked his butt off in rehab and beat his own goal by three weeks. He returned for the race at Gateway Motorsports Park, where he finished 10th.
“For me it was very straightforward,” said Bourdais, who has now won an IndyCar race in five consecutive seasons. “Once I knew what the injuries were and there were not going to be any lasting events, then it was like fast-forward and get back on the horse and get back to what I do, get back to my life. I don’t know any other way.
“It’s just a great feeling to be able to, like I said, restart the season this way and make a statement really, because it was obviously not a given.”
Sunday’s win was anything but a given. Not only did Bourdais not have the fastest car, but parts of the race were chaos, and it took a late crash to put him in position to seize the victory.
Eight cautions ended up peppering the race as drivers struggled to adapt to IndyCar’s new universal aero kit. With so much of the downforce removed from the car, tires degraded rapidly and cars were slipping and sliding all over the track.
“With that new aero kit, it was — everything was up in the air,” Bourdais said. “Nobody really knew how it was going to shake out, who was going to have what, and we were competitive.”
Recovering from an early flat tire, Coyne got Bourdais onto the ride strategy, and the veteran driver avoided the chaos, putting himself into position to strike when disaster hit the race leaders.
On the race’s final restart with two laps to go, leader Robert Wickens bumped into Alexander Rossi coming around Turn 1. Bourdais drove around the mess and took the checkered flag under yellow.
“They both wanted it really bad, and I have no idea whose fault it is or if it’s just a racing thing,” Bourdais said. “But when I saw both of them starting to drift going toward the apex and getting themselves in the marbles, I thought, ‘Oh, boy,’ and then sure enough, they both skated off, one spun, the other one recovered, and I was through, and then it went yellow, and that was that. Just a crazy day. I couldn’t dream of that ending.”
Graham Rahal, too, was the beneficiary of a wild ending, as he followed Bourdais across the finish line for a runner-up finish.
Rossi was able to recover from the incident with Wickens and finish third, giving Honda all three podium members in a race the Chevrolet-powered Team Penske drivers used to dominate.