BOURDAIS STEERS TO THREE-PEAT.

Byline: Tim Haddock Motor Sports

Sebastien Bourdais starts the Champ Car World Series with a chance to accomplish something no other driver in the history of the series has done: Win three straight championships.

The Champ Car World Series starts Sunday with the Long Beach Grand Prix. The French driver for Newman-Haas Racing comes in as the defending race champion and without equal in the series.

The numbers Bourdais has put up over the past two years are staggering. He has 16 wins in his career and six wins in 2005. He won three races in a row - the Grand Prix of Edmonton, the Grand Prix of San Jose and the Grand Prix of Denver - and his 2005 win total was three times as many as his nearest competitor.

What's scary is Bourdais said he thinks he can do better.

"Well, you can always get better, I guess," Bourdais said. "You know, I've improved in different areas of racing over the years, and especially since I came here to America, between my first season here and last year."

Paul Tracy won two races and finished fourth in points in 2005. He also is the winningest driver in Champ Car history and has won four times at Long Beach.

He leads the short list of drivers who can challenge Bourdais for the championship. Bourdais puts Tracy, Justin Wilson and Bruno Junqueira among the top contenders.

"Our team is very well aware of everybody's envy to get to the top," Bourdais said, "so we'll keep on working out and see if it's good enough."

Tracy is the most experienced and might be the top contender of the drivers listed. He won the races at Milwaukee and Cleveland in 2005 to increase his career win total to 30.

"Our goal is to win races," said Tracy, driver for Forsythe Racing, "and I think the last season we really had the speed and we had the ability to win a lot of races, but bad luck and some instances with Sebastien and a mistake on my part in Denver, which cost us a race, and a couple of other incidents with running out of fuel and having an oil leak in Australia when we were leading. Those things don't help your chances."

Wilson had a breakthrough season in 2005. He won the first two races of his Champ Car career and emerged as one of the top drivers in the series.

"Obviously very excited, looking forward to the new season," said Wilson, who drives for RuSPORT. "I think Long Beach is going to be an interesting race. Something that Paul said, all the drivers want to start off the season strong and have a good showing at Long Beach. It would be nice to get on the podium for that particular event."

Junqueira is probably Bourdais' biggest threat to ruining his chances of winning three championships in a row. Junqueira is also the most unlikely of drivers to knock Bourdais off. As teammate to Bourdais at Newman-Haas, Junqueira has access to much of the same information as the reigning champion and has been runner up in the Champ Car World Series three times.

But Junqueira is also coming off a near-career-ending injury and only competed in two races last year, not counting the Indianapolis 500, which is part of the rival Indy Racing League schedule.

Junqueira crashed and injured himself in the Indy 500 last year, sidelining him for most of the Champ Car season. It wasn't before he won the Monterrey Grand Prix in Mexico and added to his career win total, bringing it to eight. But even Junqueira doesn't have high expectations for Long Beach.

"I'm racing at a really good pace, but I'm not expecting any results from Long Beach yet," Junquiera said. "It's too early to say, but I'm expecting to give my best."

Unless veterans Jimmy Vasser or Cristiano da Matta can regain past glory, there won't be much competition for Bourdais. He has already joined Gil de Ferran, Alex Zanardi, Rick Mears and Bobby Rahal, as back-to-back Champ Car or CART champions since 1979. One more championship and he can separate himself from some of thetop names in the history of open-wheel racing.

"The statistics are obviously very nice, and everybody wants to put his name in the history book," Bourdais said. "But the bottom line is it's just racing; you can only give 100percent, and anybody who pretends he's going to give 200 percent is not true because you can only give your best and your best is 100 percent."

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Photo:

Defending Long Beach Grand Prix champ Sebastien Bourdais, in the Newman Haas Racing Lola Ford Cosworth, has 16 Champ Car career victories, six of them coming last season.

Darrell Ingham/Getty Images

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- Associated Press