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Zanardi: CART king to F1 failure

Alex Zanardi returned to F1 with Williams in 1999 as the superstar of the CART Indycar scene, but failed to score. In this candid interview he tells MARK GLENDENNING why

By Mark Glendenning
US correspondent

The November sun had long set at Fontana as Alex Zanardi drove away from the track after the CART World Series' 1998 season finale.

Earlier that afternoon he'd contested what he thought would be his final race in the US's premier open-wheel series. And, having already secured his second consecutive Indycar title, he picked a hell of a way to bow out.

On a restart with a lap to go, he'd worked with Chip Ganassi Racing team-mate Jimmy Vasser to help get the pair of them past Greg Moore, and then protected Vasser from the Canadian's attempted riposte.

That moment of selflessness cost him the million-dollar bonus that was on offer for the winner, but it meant a victory for a driver with whom he'd become extremely close, and ensured that Ganassi's squad finished one-two in the championship.

Million dollars or not, Zanardi felt good. So good that he began to wonder whether his decision to return to Formula 1 in 1999 was the right one.

By then it was too late to do anything about it. A lack of suitably strong and available candidates in the F1 paddock had prompted Frank Williams and Patrick Head to cast a wider net to lock down their 1999 line-up, and Zanardi seemed as close to a sure thing as they'd ever find.

Not only was he the dominant driver in a series that, at the time, was still a genuine rival for F1 as the greatest single-seater show on the planet, but he already had previous F1 experience via fragmented campaigns with Jordan, Minardi and Lotus. The Italian signed a multi-year deal with Williams before the CART season was out.

But even with an F1 contract in his pocket; a contract with a team that had taken Damon Hill and Jacques Villeneuve to consecutive drivers' titles in 1996 and '97 respectively, Zanardi couldn't shake a niggling doubt.

"That day [at Fontana], I was so happy for Jimmy winning the race that I really questioned myself; I really questioned whether I'd done the right thing, because at that point I had already announced that I was going to go to Williams to drive in Formula 1," he says 16 years later.

"And maybe that was also the beginning of my weakness. This is one of my great regrets, that I was not able to deliver to Sir Frank what he paid for, because I have so much respect for the man that I would have loved to be able to deliver one tenth of what I was able to give to Chip Ganassi."

Zanardi arrived during a period of transition for Williams. Renault, which had been integral to the team's 1996 and '97 successes as works engine supplier, had departed at the end of '97, leaving the cars to reply on power from Mecachrome in '98 and Supertec for the Italian's season in '99.

The engines were different in name, but shared some key fundamentals: they were essentially the '97 Renaults in fancy dress. In short, Zanardi and team-mate Ralf Schumacher were using updated versions of two-year-old engines, with no manufacturer support.

It was also during this era that Adrian Newey left Williams for McLaren: the dominant FW19 of 1997 was his parting gift to the team.

The sense of a team undergoing a minor identity crisis was even evident in the livery: Williams's first year without a manufacturer partner coincided with the departure of sponsor Rothmans, and for 1998 it switched to a red paint job with a large picture of a kangaroo.

The addition of random splashes of other colours in '99 prompted Murray Walker to comment that it looked like someone had simply loaded a cannon with paint and stickers and fired it at the car.

"I'm not suggesting that the [1999] car was good," says Patrick Head. "Obviously we were running the Supertec engine, which really didn't have any development at all so it was probably a few horsepower back, and that means that you have to do what Red Bull are having to do this year and run less wing than other people - but the car wasn't better aerodynamically than the others."

It sounds like an excuse in a bottle: success in F1 is tremendously dependent upon equipment, so Zanardi can't have been expected to do much in a car that wasn't up to the job.

The problem there is that despite the FW21's shortcomings, Schumacher managed to score 35 points with it. Zanardi didn't even score one.

"For sure, the car did not help me," Zanardi says. "But I guess I could have driven it in a different way."

A more fundamental problem could be traced back to those doubts that first emerged at Fontana. It's hard work to find any Zanardi interview from the past 15 years where he doesn't talk about 'passion'. And this, he believes, is the ingredient he was missing in 1999.

"Technically, I could not have chosen to drive a worse car in terms of my driving style and what I needed, but I did not have a crystal ball," he says.

"Still, there were times where with a little bit more commitment I could have found a way to become more passionate about what I was doing.

"I did not jump on my handcycle because I wanted to win a gold medal; I won a gold medal because I wanted to jump on my handcycle. And it's as simple as that.

"A Formula 1 team manager can pay you millions of dollars but, if you don't want to drive that car from the bottom of your heart, you're not going to give everything you are capable of.

"For some reason I had that chemistry when I was driving for Ganassi. And I should have worked to produce a more passionate approach to Williams."

In this regard, Head agrees.

"Alex was a lovely guy to have in the team, a great character and a great personality, but I think there was an attitude problem," he says.

"He was always looking for something outside himself and the big problem for him was the carbon brakes. He struggled and struggled and eventually went to steel brakes with carbon-metallic pads - which to my surprise actually weren't that bad.

"The problem was that two or three laps after new, the performance level would drop a bit. It added 10 kilos to the car, and the car wasn't hugely underweight. But it was Alex's choice.

"With Alex, we tried every different brake material, brake manufacturer, every type of blanking to try and get the brakes to feel like he wanted.

"The engineers never gave up trying, but after a bit the mechanics... when someone comes on the radio again complaining about the brakes when the other guy never mentions it... eventually even the mechanics got a bit fed up with him."

Zanardi hints that he struggled with motivation early in the season when he found himself saddled with an uncompetitive car.

"Had I found, technically speaking, a similar situation at Williams to what I found at Ganassi, everything would have been much easier for me, because you go out, you win the first races, everybody pats your back and then of course you become passionate for what you do."

Where he and Head diverge is over how assertive Zanardi was early on: where Head suggests that his new driver was constantly asking for modifications to the brakes, Zanardi doesn't think he tried to impose his will strongly enough until it was too late.

"When I arrived at Williams everybody was just very quiet," he says. "Everything I would say, they'd just say, 'Sure Alex, no problem Alex'.

"At the end of the day Williams is a team that has a tremendous history, but they were coming from a difficult time, whereas I was the Indycar champion. They came over to the United States to ask me to drive for them. I didn't offer myself to them.

"When you have that power, you have to use it. Not for your own advantage, but when you're sure about something, you should say, 'OK, I want to try my way. And if it doesn't work, let's try your idea, but we'll try mine first'. And instead I was too passive. I let too many things happen that I thought were not correct for me.

"And by the time I said, 'OK, that's it, I'm going to go there and fight as hard as it takes, but I'm going to straighten things up or people are going to lose confidence in me, I'm going to lose confidence in the team, and the relationship will degenerate further and further'... that had already happened."

Zanardi's confidence was not helped by the fact that all the time he was struggling, Schumacher was consistently dragging the car up towards the front: aside from three DNFs, he only finished outside the top five once all season.

The Italian's big opportunity to even things out came on home turf at Monza, where he qualified on the second row, one place ahead of the German, only to damage the underside of his car during the race by being too aggressive with the kerbs. Schumacher went on to finish second.

By then, Zanardi did not need to be told where he stood in terms of Williams's internal pecking order, and he redoubled his efforts to capture some momentum over the final few races of the season. But the team had already lost faith.

"Patrick Head is a man I respect tremendously for what he's done, for what he is," he says. "If he's got something to say, he won't send his secretary to tell you. I adore him.

"But if he has his own idea, you won't change his mind. And his idea was that I was not committed, I was not good enough for the job, and I was not fast enough. And maybe at least for the first two things, I have to say that I agree with him.

"At that point I wanted to change myself in order to be the driver that Williams wanted me to be. And it was too late."

Zanardi was not the sole architect of his pain. The FW21 was a fragile car, yet the failures rarely manifested themselves on Schumacher's side of the garage.

This might have made sense if Zanardi were the type of driver to be hard on his equipment but, with the exception of his over exuberance at Monza, he tended to be the opposite. Indeed, this was one of his secrets to taming the wildly overpowered CART cars in which he'd been so successful.

"For some reason Ralf never had a failure," he says. "Every time I was about to go out in qualifying, I would have a diff problem, or something electrical would stop me, and very often I was not able to put together what I could have done.

"I remember Patrick saying, 'Well Alex, your diff failed 18 times this year, and always in qualifying or the race. And we simply don't understand why that happened, because everything we see about your driving style shows that it's much more gentle on the equipment. My conclusion is that you're simply unlucky.'

"And to hear a British person talk about luck... well, that says it all."

Despite the multi-year contractual agreement between Zanardi and the team, it was clear well before the final race that the relationship was not going to last.

The decision to split carried financial implications for Williams, which had to pay Zanardi out of the remainder of his contract, but it was the competitive element of the failure that hurt more.

There's no such thing as a certainty in racing, but on paper there was every reason to believe that the Zanardi/Williams combination could have worked.

"We had made a very big decision to pull him in from racing in America," says Head.

"We didn't want him to fail - it was Frank's and my decision together, and you never want to have a bad decision, quite apart from never wanting to see somebody go through that kind of anguish. There was no lack of trying by the team within the limitations of the car.

"It was a very frustrating year for him and us because we were a one-car team as far as scoring points.

"I'm not saying it was a good car, but it was a more capable car than the 1998 one, and it was let down by an engine that probably wasn't well developed, and maybe the aero wasn't tip-top, but Ralf could well have got quite a lot more points than the 35 he did.

"But Alex was a lovely bloke and when you look at what he achieved both before he lost his legs and after, you couldn't have a guy with greater determination. In terms of what he's done in touring cars and also in the Olympics, he has shown amazing character."

For all his candour regarding the part he played in the collapse of his 1999 season, Zanardi says that if he were to be transported back to the 1990s, he would still sign with Williams. The difference would be in how he handled things once he arrived.

"If I could go back in time, I would not avoid that choice," he says. "I would try to do something to make that choice a winning one.

"I am glad that I once heard Sir Frank saying that he is questioning himself as to why that season didn't work, but that he also still believes that it was not a question of lack of talent. It was a question of not producing the right chemistry to make it work among us.

"It was a failure for both sides. I'm not afraid of admitting what my limits were. And I'm sure that if I could go back, I could be a better driver for Williams. But unfortunately I wasn't.

"Still, I feel like a very lucky person. In life, in order to recognise when you've had a good day, you have to have experienced a bad one.

"So in these respects, I've had a perfect life. I've run through some holes and some bumps, but every one of them made me appreciate very much the occasions when the road was smooth."

TEAM-MATE'S VIEW: RALF SCHUMACHER

For me the 1999 Williams wasn't difficult, but I expect if you'd come from the States, racing an 800 kilogramme car on mostly ovals, I guess that was Alex's main issue.

There were some occasions where he was really fast, but others where he was really... unhappy with the balance of the car. He didn't trust it, and I guess that's why he didn't get the maximum out of it.

He had his problems with the carbon brakes to begin with, so he was trying to warm the brakes up like steel brakes, but he was glazing them.

It was things like that. It took him a bit too long to get used to it, and as is the case often in Formula 1, you just don't get the chance.

It was a difficult time for Williams. We had what was at that time a very heavy, low-powered engine, and the mechanical design was still with steel everywhere around the car. We didn't have carbon parts on the suspension, even.

It was a bit difficult to drive I suppose. It was soft, it was rolling a lot. For me it wasn't a big problem, but I know how it is to drive a car that you can't feel. That's very difficult.

Of course it makes you happy to be quicker than your team-mate, but to a degree, it didn't really help the team. For a certain amount of time you try to beat your team-mate, and then you come together and try to develop the car.

That was the bigger problem; obviously he wanted things that I didn't want, and that didn't help the team. I think it's important for a team to have two drivers that are close to each other, that are going in the same direction.

Ralf Schumacher was talking to Andrew van Leeuwen