Sebastien Bourdais frequently was quoted as favoring a merger of the Champ Car and IndyCar series during his time in America, when the Frenchman scored four consecutive Champ Car World Series titles. Now that it has happened, however Bourdais put himself firmly in the “against” camp. Speaking to reporters in Jerez, Spain, where he was testing for his new team—the Scuderia Toro Rosso Formula 1 team—Bourdais described the manner in which the American open-wheel series merged as “a disaster” for Champ Car teams.
“We had all been waiting for it for a long time, but obviously didn’t expect it 30 days before the start of a season,” he declared. “It’s not a merger, it’s the death of Champ Car and the IRL taking over—the schedules, cars, everything. It’s the cars (the IRL teams) have been running around with for five years, so what are the Champ Car teams going to be able to do? Nothing.
“The cars are really, really, really hard to develop. It’s all tiny little things, especially on ovals,” he said. “In year one Bruno (Junqueira) my teammate, not knowing the car, was on the first row. We made a few developments over the year, but obviously not much because it wasn’t our car. The Frenchman believes the only hope for the Champ Car teams is if the IRL rapidly adopts a new technical package.
“Hopefully they will change the cars quite quickly because otherwise it’s going to a slow death for all the teams that try and make (the switch) happen,” Bourdais said. “How do you find sponsors when you’re running at the back? It doesn’t matter if you’re Newman/Haas or anybody else. “Newman/Haas is going to get it figured out somehow, but when you look at how badly Andretti Green struggled for two years to get to Penske and Ganassi’s level—and that was with their resources and four cars—I think it’s a bit more complicated than people seem to think. It’s horrible. ” “(The merger) is very good for the sport; it’s just that it’s going to cause a lot of trouble. A lot of people are going to lose jobs and it’s going to take a long time to rebuild.”
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