By Andrew Cutler
December 13 2006

For the past three years, Sebastien Bourdais has been hoping that his domination of the Champ Car series would draw the attention of a Formula One team. After recently stating that he had all but given up on his F1 dreams,thanks to STR he now will at least have one shot at reviving them. Bourdais will participate in this week's winter test session for Scuderia Toro Rosso at Jerez, Spain. At this point it appears that he will get to drive all three days that STr will be there, Dec 13-15.

With three consecutive Champ Car series titles and 23 wins to his credit, the 27 year-old Frenchman has been increasingly frustrated by the lack of interest shown to him by the F1 community. While he did land a test drive for Renault back in 2002, he has not recieved any further offers since that he has been tempted to consider. F1 teams have offered test drives before, but "Sea Bass" has, to this point, been reluctant to consider any offers that did not hold out the promise of an eventual race seat. A Spokeswoman for STR has denied that there is any "deal" for a race seat in the future as part of this test drive opportunity.

While Team Pinciple Gerhard Berger has insisted all along that STR will almost certainly retain current drivers Vitantonio Liuzzi and Scott Speed for the 2007 season, the team has still to make any "formal" announcement to this effect. For his part, while Bourdais is contracted to the Newman-Haas Champ car team for 2007, his contract with them reportedly has an "option" that allows him to leave if he recieves a suitable offer from an F1 team.