Forget all that Bourdais didn’t achieve in the final standings; placing 25th was hardly indicative of what the Frenchman delivered during his partial season with Dragon Racing. And to think—despite all of his success in the 2000s, Bourdais is still only 33 years old…two years older than Will Power and one year older than new IndyCar champion Ryan Hunter-Reay. He’s been around for a long time, yet is just hitting his prime.

Paired with the highly talented engineer Neil Fife, the two opened the season by making the Chevy- and Honda-powered teams to do a double take when looking at the sector times around St. Petersburg.

Saddled with almost no testing and a Lotus engine that lacked, well, everything, Bourdais was a revelation in the corners, either leading the field or sitting second to Team Penske’s Will Power on the corner-by-corner breakdown of how fast each car navigated the street circuit.

He’d continue the routine at the rolling Barber Motorsports Park road course—a track that should have penalized all of the Lotus runners—yet battled from 17th on the grid to ninth at the finish, the first and only Top-10 result for Lotus in 2012.

He and Legge would get Chevys for Round 5 at Indy, and with Bourdais relegated to competing on the road and street courses while his teammate took the ovals in Dragon’s single-car entry, the fireworks began.

The team’s last of on-track testing and off-track development work can’t be understated, which makes Bourdais’ run of qualifying in the Firestone Fast 6 in four of the six races he ran after Indy all the more incredible.

Lacking the terabytes of data the rest of the field had accumulated, Bourdais and Fife showed what a pair of veterans with a firm grasp of the fundamentals can achieve. As he noted in his personal review of the season, their pace on Saturday rarely translated into results on Sunday, with his run to fourth at Mid-Ohio serving as the one major exception.

His crash at Sonoma—one that destroyed his chassis and injured Josef Newgarden—set in motion something that Bourdais is rarely given credit for--his mental toughness. He showed up to the bumpy streets of Baltimore a few days later looking like Mirko Cro Cop had spent an afternoon slamming leg kicks into left side of his body, and specifically, his ribs, yet rather than step out of the seat or limp around at the back of the field, he gritted his teeth and went on the attack.

With the jarring pain from Baltimore's railroad tracks acting as a lap-by-lap reminder of Sonoma crash, he still equaled his best start of the year by claiming third, only to drop out early in the race with mechanical woes.

It was in many ways a fitting end to his year. Tons of promise, brilliant performances behind the wheel but little to show for it in the final reckoning.

Bourdais will have Fife, Chevy and his first full season of open-wheel racing since 2007 to show what he’s still capable of. Going up against the big teams won’t be any easier in 2013, but if he and the team can get to the finish line with fewer interruptions, a win or two should be possible.

INDYCAR: Katherine Legge Season Review & Photo Gallery

Marshall Pruett is SPEED.com's Auto Racing Editor, and covers the IndyCar Series. Before joining SPEED, Pruett worked in open-wheel racing for 20 years as a mechanic and engineer. He also contributes to RACER, Road & Track and Racecar Engineering. Follow him @MarshallPruett.