Remembering Alex Zanardi

The start of the Month of May is usually a joyous occasion, but this year, we’ll start it in mourning. Over the weekend, we lost Alessandro “Alex” Zanardi, one of the greatest drivers to ever compete in American open-wheel racing, or indeed any form of racing.

After four years and a single points-scoring performance in Formula One, Zanardi started pursuing a seat in CART in 1995, but wouldn’t land his drive at Chip Ganassi Racing until 1996, the year the Split began. The first taste of what he’d achieve came at the Rio 400, where he took pole and finished 4th, and after an otherwise rocky first half of the season, the second half saw Zanardi fully come into his own. Over races nine through sixteen, he either finished on the podium or not at all, picking up three wins, two silvers, one bronze, and five poles, including the last four in a row. His victories came at the Portland 200, Mid-Ohio 200, and most famously, the Grand Prix of Monterey, where Zanardi pulled a race-winning move on the final trip down the Corkscrew so daring that it’s known simply as The Pass. It has to be seen to be believed:

In all, the second-half surge pulled Zanardi to Rookie of the Year honors and the losing end of a tiebreaker with Michael Andretti for 2nd place overall. His performances also helped Honda take its first ever Manufacturers’ Cup.

After starting so hot, his 1997 got even hotter. He took the first two poles, then the win at Long Beach, but it was once again the second half where he shined brightest. Over a five-race stretch from Cleveland to Road America, he took four wins and a runner-up, including a superspeedway win at the U.S. 500 in Michigan. After that, he scored his 10th and final pole in Vancouver and a podium at Laguna Seca. An injury in practice took Zanardi out of the finale at Fontana, but it didn’t matter, as he still easily won his first National Championship.

With the #1 now on his car rather than teammate Jimmy Vasser’s, Zanardi spent 1998 painting his masterpiece. He missed the podium just four times all season and secured a career-high seven wins, with crown defenses in Long Beach and Cleveland, a reclaimed throne in Portland, and new conquests at Gateway, Detroit, Toronto, and Surfers’ Paradise. Naturally, that meant a second straight National Championship, as well as practically winning the Manufacturers’ Cup for Honda by himself, and this time he left everybody so far in the dust that not even season runner-up Vasser finished within 100 points of him. If you’re looking for forebears to Álex Palou’s 2025, this is exactly the kind of year you’ll find, and to commemorate his back-to-back titles, Acura produced a special edition of their iconic NSX named after him.

With that kind of domination, it was no surprise Zanardi went back to F1 for 1999, but he would once again be ill-fated, scoring no points in his unreliable Williams while another all-time great, Juan Pablo Montoya, inherited Zanardi’s car and immediately stormed to a National Championship on the first try. After spending 2000 on the sidelines. Zanardi returned to CART with upstarts Mo Nunn Racing just in time for 2001, a season from Hell for nearly all involved. In much worse equipment than he’d enjoyed at Ganassi, Zanardi squeezed out the occasional decent result, scoring four top-tens, the fastest lap at Motegi, and 4th place at Portland, but at the American Memorial in Germany, just four days after 9/11, he became the season’s biggest on-track tragedy. With just 13 laps to go and the lead in hand, Zanardi lost control exiting the pit lane and collided with Alex Tagliani. Zanardi survived, but at the cost of both legs.

At that moment, Zanardi’s open-wheel career instantly ended, and it left him as something of a what-if despite all his success. The fact that he never got to attempt the Indianapolis 500 while able-bodied remains one of the more painful drawbacks of the Split era. However, it wasn’t his last open-wheel ride. Two years after the crash, CART returned to the EuroSpeedway, and in a modified car with driving aids added, Zanardi hopped back in and symbolically completed his race, driving 13 laps by himself at speeds that would have been good for P5 if he’d posted them in the previous day’s qualifying. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a moment worth getting caught up in:

“When I woke up without legs,” Zanardi later said, “I looked at the half that was left, not the half that was lost.” Despite the gnarly end to his CART days, his competitive spirit and love for racing didn’t take a scratch, and from here on out, his career took two roads. In cars, Zanardi became a BMW works driver for the rest of his automotive career, starting with two rounds of Monza in an adapted 320i at the end of the 2003 European Touring Car Championship season. He’d stick with that series full-time for the rest of the 2000s as it upgraded to the World Touring Car Championship, and while he never contended for a title, he picked up four race wins and played his part to help BMW take three straight World Manufacturers’ Championships. He was also a force on Italy’s national touring car scene, winning eight out of 14 races to claim the 2005 Italian Superturismo Championship, then winning four more races in the 2006 season.

Starting from 2007, Zanardi also began to compete in paracycling, debuting with 4th place at the New York Marathon after just a month of training. He entered his first Para-Cycling Road World Championships in 2009, and by 2010, he was all in on trying to make the Italian Paralympic team for London 2012. Not only did he make it there, he lit it up, leaving Brands Hatch with gold medals in the time trial and road race events, as well as a silver in the road relay. To go from where he was in September 2001 to an even higher level of sporting achievement is a testament to both his elite racing talent and his indomitable spirit.

For the rest of the 2010s, Zanardi would race bikes and cars in parallel. In the former, he returned to the Paralympics in 2016 and once again took two golds and a silver. He was also a fixture of the UCL Para-cycling Road World Championships, winning twelve gold medals between 2013 and 2019. In motorsport, meanwhile, he ran a mix of touring and GT cars in such series as DTM, IMSA, and the Italian GT Championship. The last of those saw his final motorsport victory in 2016, when he won the season finale at Mugello.

However, in 2020, paracycling proved an even crueler mistress than his original career. During a road race that June, Zanardi lost control downhill and hit a truck headfirst, requiring three hours of neurosurgery, several facial reconstructive procedures, and 18 months in the hospital while he slowly regained his faculties. In December 2021, he returned home, and he spent his last few years living quietly in Bologna, the city where he was born, until his passing this past Friday at age 59. It’s unfairly early for a man of his caliber, but given how many times he cheated death, I’m just thankful we got to share this world with him as long as we did.

A fierce competitor on track and a gentleman off it, Zanardi was a welcome presence wherever he went, and though he’s gone, we can still feel his influence in pockets all across the racing world, from Robert Wickens’s own post-paralysis IMSA career to the many top drivers worldwide who got their start driving Zanardi’s line of go-karts. His two CART titles formed the heart of Chip Ganassi’s breakthrough dynasty, setting the team standard that the likes of Montoya, Scott Dixon, and Palou have all upheld since. And whenever a driver in any discipline celebrates a win by doing donuts, they’re following a tradition that he started after winning at Long Beach in 1997. Given that, I think there’s no better sendoff than to roll that clip.

Grazie, Alessandro.