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PROMISING Signs; For Champ Car, the future looks like a future.(News)
Byline: J.P. VETTRAINO
A year can make a big difference... or not much difference at all.
In 2003 Paul Tracy ended one era with an emphatic championship run, and fans and participants had fair reason to believe this series could not survive another season. This year Sebastien Bourdais just as forcefully launched a new era. Doubts about the short-term survivability of the road show previously known as CART, however, should finally be buried.
Tracy won seven races and six poles en route to the last CART championship; Bourdais collected seven wins and eight poles (in four fewer events) chasing the first drivers' title under the Champ Car banner. Whether or not more changed in 2004 than stayed the same, a 25-year-old Frenchman born in the infield at Le Mans was clearly the class of the reformed Champ Car World Series.
Bourdais was a relative unknown when he came to America in 2003, hired by Newman-Haas Racing on the strength of his 2002 FIA F3000 championship and an impressive preseason test at Sebring. He won three races as a CART rookie and four more in the first seven races this season. He did so in the calculated, precise, deceptively fast style of such legends as Jackie Stewart and Alain Prost. Bourdais was at his best leading a race, metering his pace and never going faster than he had to.
Yet a different Bourdais appeared for the next seven races. This one pushed when he might have cruised, to the point of creating some of his own bad luck. Occasionally he had no choice but to push. In Denver Bourdais produced the most stirring drive of 2004, passing every car on the track after he fell from pole position to last during first-corner contact. His thoughts after the season finale in Mexico City, where he trounced the field when a top-10 finish would have clinched the championship, might have defined the real "SeaBass.'' The thinking man's driver is a charger at heart.
"I knew that if I could get through [the first corner] without crashing, I could take it as easy as I wanted to,'' Bourdais said. "But then it became a question of honor. I'm a racer, and I'm supposed to win races.''
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