Sebastien Bourdais is seething with rage after the penalty against Cadillac 38 in Bahrain and accuses the race commissioners of having no idea about racing.
Sebastien Bourdais is furious after the season finale of the World Endurance Championship (WEC) in Bahrain. The Frenchman, who shares the Cadillac V-Series.R 38 with Earl Bamber and Jenson Button, sharply criticizes the stewards after the trio received a 30-second stop-and-go penalty for the accident with the AF Corse Ferrari 54 (Flohr/Castellacci/Rigon), which ended the GT team’s race.
“To be honest, I’m just tired of the stewards’ decisions, who clearly don’t understand racing situations,”
“It’s extremely frustrating. Every driver in the paddock—I’d say 75 percent—thinks the GT was at fault in this case. I just don’t understand how you can penalize the prototype.”
⚠️ Safety car
HUGE G-force crash for 54 Vista AF Corse but great to see Thomas Flohr get out unaided.
Watch our season finale LIVE on https://t.co/IPZa0nvsLu WEC 8HBahrain pic.twitter.com/MIg9TG77IU
— FIA World Endurance Championship (@FIAWEC) November 8, 2025
“I just want us to get to the point where they tell me what they think should have been done. If they have a valid argument, then I understand. But otherwise, I’m sorry. It was just a racing accident, and we’re lucky we didn’t retire.”
The incident occurred when Button was battling with the BMW 20 (Rast/Wittmann/S. van der Linde) and collided with Thomas Flohr’s GT Ferrari in traffic. Button saw a gap on the left, while Flohr didn’t expect anyone to pass there. “The guy just overreacted when the BMW stuck its nose in on the right and drove into Jenson’s car. How can that be our fault?” asks the former Formula 1 driver rhetorically. “The GT drivers have rear cameras, they can see exactly what’s happening behind them. And yet they still drive into us, and in the end it’s the prototype’s fault again.”
“You might as well park the car right away”
Bourdais is particularly angry about the severity of the penalty: “It wasn’t even a normal drive-through penalty or a ten-second penalty—we lost a full minute! You might as well park the car.”
Up to that point, the performance had been better than the result suggested: “I had two good stints, Earl was driving strongly, and Jenson also did a good job. But somehow we’re always on the wrong side of the fence,” he says. “The performance was there, but it just always goes against us.”
“We made the wrong strategic decision in the first phase,” admits Bourdais. “We had saved fuel and should have stayed out longer. But the engineers overreacted because the BMW was in traffic, and we pitted too early. Then you refuel less, think you can push—but instead you have to save fuel again. That basically ended the race.”
A safety car could have helped—but it was the Cadillac itself that caused the neutralization with the incident. “We were hoping for a yellow phase, but in the end, we were the ones who triggered it,” says Bourdais. “It’s always the same—as soon as an accident happens, someone has to be to blame. And that’s always the prototype. I’m just tired of it.”
