Seb’s story is as endearing as Ruben’s. After losing his F1 ride and becoming a sports car regular for Peugeot, he came back to the States last year to run the road races for Dale Coyne. He went from Newman/Haas in Champ Car and Toro Rosso’s big budget operation to one of the smallest teams in IndyCar.

But he didn’t complain, he put his head down and drove hard all season because he still had the fire for open wheel. He impressed a lot of people with his attitude and, suddenly, it was easy to pull for Bourdais.

Just like Sunday when he got the most out of the least.

“I don’t know about that,’’ he responded when asked if his top 10 finish was as good an accomplishment as a victory. “I was able to make a lot of moves as other people’s tires went off and that was fun.

“Considering all our problems it was a good result, definitely. But that’s as hard as I can drive.’’

His competitors took notice.

“Damn, Bourdais did a helluva job,’’ said winner Will Power. “Can you imagine if he was driving for our team or Ganassi’s?’’

AS GOOD AS IT GETS

A great crowd at Barber Motorsports Park (50,000 plus) was treated to one of the best road races in recent history.

On a gorgeous road course built specifically for motorcycles, IndyCar did itself proud as, for the second week in a row, the drivers ran each other hard and clean and passing was plentiful.

“I was wrong, I said no way we could pass and I give Firestone a lot of the credit,” said Power, who charged from ninth to first. “It was really good and then it started going off and that’s exactly what we need because it allows a lot of passing.”

Marco Andretti, Simon Pagenaud and Oriol Servia did more overtaking than anybody and Graham Rahal had a couple nifty restarts go from eighth to fourth.

“I’ve never been so happy to finish 10th and I passed a lot of cars after my car finally started to feel good for the first time,’’ said four-time IndyCar champ Dario Franchitti after going from 18th to 10th.

Dallara deserves a tip of the hat because it’s constructed a sturdy car, as evidenced by several incidents of banging wheels or wings without knocking anybody out.

Chief Steward Beaux Barfield’s idea to throw the green before the start/finish line also has made for two straight weekends of good starts and 2-by-2 restarts. Oh yeah, and he got rid of those imaginary lines in the track that promoted bogus passing and the result?

Two consecutive races with real overtaking.

Robin Miller brings 40 years of experience to his role as SPEED.com's senior open-wheel reporter, and serves as a frequent contributor to SPEED Center and Wind Tunnel with Dave Despain.

The opinions reflected herein are solely those of the above commentator and are not necessarily those of SPEED.com, FOX, NewsCorp, or SPEED