Formula 1 Toro Rosso driver Sebastien Bourdais dominated in Champ Car, but he has not had good results since joining Formula One this season.

For the past four years, Sebastien Bourdais was the king of Champ Car racing.

Driving for the powerful Newman/Haas/Lanigan Racing team, Bourdais dominated the now-defunct American open-wheel series like it had never been dominated before, winning 28 of 55 races on the way to an unprecedented four consecutive series championships.

Now, the 29-year-old Frenchman is spending his time at or near the rear of the Formula One grid racing for Scuderia Toro Rosso.

Last weekend at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve in Montreal, Bourdais hit the wall in practice, broke his gearbox and had to start from the rear of the field in Sunday’s Canadian Grand Prix. He spun in the race and finished a lap behind the leaders in 13th place.

And that was his second-best result of the season.

“It’s quite different, obviously,” Bourdais said before getting on the track in Canada. “We moved and we don’t contend for wins any more. But it’s been quite enjoyable. A lot of things to discover and reset, but so far, so good.”

Despite being rather old for an F1 rookie and going with a year-old team that was unlikely to contend for anything, Bourdais was excited to get started this season. And it all looked so promising after he earned his first two F1 points with a seventh-place finish in the opener at Melbourne, Australia.

Since then, though, it’s been a blur of bad luck and bad racing.

Until Sunday, Bourdais had failed to finish four of his last five starts and had only a 15th-place finish in Bahrain to show for that stretch.

Bourdais knows he isn’t likely to be challenging for wins any time soon. After his successes in Champ Car, you might think he is hanging his head.

You would be wrong.

“It doesn’t matter what you’re fighting for,” Bourdais said, a smile lighting up his face. “You’re just doing your job and doing the best you can and then you end up where you end up.”

With so much disparity among the F1 teams in resources and talent, it’s not always easy assess the abilities of drivers racing for teams at the bottom of the grid.

Patrick Head, engineering director for the Williams F1 team and a longtime observer of the sport, likes what he has seen of Bourdais.

“Like a lot of things, you’ve got to get everything working together,” Head noted. “One’s also got to remember that up until Monaco they were running last year’s car, albeit with some development. I think he well justifies his place in Formula One and I quite expect to see him starting putting results together soon.”