Sunday Times
May 11th 2003

Motor racing: The big interview: Alex Zanardi: The Human Race

Alex Zanardi is sitting on a dustbin outside garage No 29, wearing racing overalls and signing autographs until his arm aches. But he is happy, ecstatically happy. For the first time since a dark day back in September 2001, when he lost his legs but won the battle for life, he can use the present tense and say: "I am a racing driver." 

Those who were at the Lausitzring on Friday evening will forget the moment no more easily than Zanardi. And yet it all seemed so remarkably ordinary. At just after 5.30pm in this flat, gently rural part of eastern Germany, Zanardi walked down the iron stairs from the team offices on the balcony to go and drive a racing car. He chatted to his mechanics for a time, climbed into the car, put on his fireproof mask, his helmet and his gloves, and was wheeled out on to the track. 

Zanardi had waited 18 months to feel the power beneath him again. His eyes were alert, then anonymous beneath the visor. The engine spluttered and howled, the grid cleared, and with barely a missed beat he was back in his old world. For his wife, Daniella, waiting by the pit wall, the familiar, receding drone, the theme tune of her marriage, had never sounded so warm. 
The chants of a small crowd, scattered across the vast grandstand, added to the surreal nature of the scene, but there was no mistaking the sense of relief as the pitlane community returned to their rituals on the eve of a race weekend. 
Everybody felt better: Alex was back. 

Today, before the start of the German 500, the second leg of the Champ Cars European tour, the laps will be for real, all 13 of them. The significance of that number will not be lost on the crowd. Just 18 months ago, Zanardi was exiting the pitlane to start his final stint of the inaugural Champ Car race in Europe, when he spun across the infield and out across the track. With all the instincts of a double champion and long-time race leader, he tried to correct the back end. Hurtling at 200mph round the tighter of the two left-hand corners in the diamond-shaped super-speedway, all Alex Tagliani could see was the burgundy red and white cockpit of the Reynard Honda broadside across his path. He didn't even have time to brake before he and Zanardi collided. The horrific pictures on television that night caused nations to wince. It was that sort of accident. There were 13 laps to go. 

Zanardi does not readily talk of exorcising ghosts or finishing life's jigsaws. He just wanted to have the car looking exactly the same as it was on the last morning he woke up with flesh and blood for legs. "Control the controllable," the psychologists say, and through long hours of rehab, he had learnt the painful truth of that sportsman's trite dictum. 

Every ache from the joints where the artificial leg rubs against his thigh reminded him of the uncontrollable, but he never really calculated the thickness of the line between possible and impossible, neither on the racetrack nor in life. So when the idea of building a racing car for a man with no legs first came up, his imagination - and a keen eye for publicity - buried the reality. Apart from the little black thumb grip on the left side of the steering wheel, the lever in front of the gear stick that acts as the clutch, and the metal box for a brake pedal, the Reynard squatting at the back of the Mi-Jack Conquest team garage was identical to the car which left the pits 18 months earlier, right down to the "A Zanardi" discreetly painted in white letters on the side and the number 66 on the back wing. It is not just the car that is being rebuilt. 

Zanardi jokes about it. "Hell," he says, "I've just had the longest pit stop in the history of motor sport." Outside, on the balcony a little earlier, somebody had pointed out a banner on the back straight. "Welcome back, Alex!" it read. "That's nice," says Zanardi before pointing at the far turn with his crutch. "They should put another banner over there - 'Don't stop here, Alex'." His audience don't know whether to laugh or cry. Alex has been keeping them guessing for a while now. When asked why he is doing this, why he has come back here, of all places, to get back in a car, he says it is to raise funds for his charitable foundation, and for fun. "I have always enjoyed my work," he says with a touching and almost unbelievable naivete. 
Only later, in the quiet of the team offices, does he expand on the theme: "It's personal, of course, and symbolic. People think the dominating thing will be fear, but they are wrong. I'm a guy who lives for the present, I've never believed that what I did yesterday can change my tomorrow. No, the dominating feeling will be one of pride, to be able to do something I love so much, that I want to do so badly, and after 1Å years, to put my life back together the way I want. It's important I run the car here." 

ZANARDI is a hard man to break down. There is a simplicity to his philosophy that makes questioning seem almost superfluous. In motor racing, he says, you know the risks, so you can't feel sorry for yourself if the odds turn against you. His father, a plumber in the little village of Castel Maggiore, just outside Bologna, taught him how to make things out of nothing. Why should life be any different from mending pipes, or, on one occasion, welding a go-kart chassis together with a homemade blowtorch and a piece of fencing wire? At the height of his dominance of Cart single-seater racing in the US, the Italian won 12 races in two seasons, becoming only the third driver to win successive championships. He was not just quick, he was quick on Sunday afternoons, and smart, like his father. 

The memories are good ones, at least in the US. The dashing passing manoeuvre to claim victory in Laguna Seca, the words of Chip Ganassi - "Alex, second is okay" ringing in his ears - and the 25 cars he passed on the way to victory in Cleveland, Ohio. His two spells in Formula One, initially with Lotus, then with Williams, proved only what they say about nice guys and losing. 

The first sighting of Zanardi at the Lausitzring comes as he walks through the press room, a stick in either hand, stopping to joke with old friends. The press always admired his spirit and his sense of dignity, even on bad days in F1. Outside the media centre, three flights of metal steps lead to the team's offices. He mounts them, stiffly, like a man on stilts, a look of intense concentration and effort on his face. Applause breaks out from the crowd below. 

He recalls going back to Toronto last year to be grand marshal of the track for the Champ Cars. He had travelled halfway across the world to be there, and his legs, still getting used to their invasive extras, were aching terribly. To reach the little hut where he had to wave the chequered flag, he had to climb an almost vertical stairwell. To make matters worse, the crowd in the grandstand had noticed the little figure and stood to acknowledge his courage. 

Then he recalls only the silence as the magnitude of the task ahead dawned on both him and them. Slowly, he mounted the steps, emerging at the top what seemed like a lifetime later to an ecstatic welcome. 
There have been big, public triumphs of will; mostly, just little unseen victories in his mind. Throwing stones into the sea with his young son, Niccolo, or the day he was able to walk 3km in 50 minutes. Driving his own car, or putting on his shoes. 
"I took all my rehabilitation as a race," he explains. "The same kind of determination. It's been a challenge, and when I have my rewards, I have my victory. When I did that 3km, that was a huge win for me. I arrived home sweaty and sticky, and I felt the same sensation as in the days I ran 10km in 40 minutes. It was great. 

"Life has changed only in the scale of measurement. The real challenge is to find your limits and try to push them forward. As long as you know your limit and what you have to fight, it doesn't matter whether your limit is here (he holds his hand high) or down here (his hand drops lower)." 

To survive in rehab, he set himself a simple goal. Every day, he worked until he forced his personal trainer to say, "That's it, Alex, finish now." Zanardi would never say it himself. Then he would do one more repetition, just to prove who was the toughest. 

"I realised the last time I took my boat out how much faster I was at doing all the things on the boat: loose the ropes, get to the front, start the engine. I mean, man, it's so much easier. I would not be human if I said I had never thought about having my legs again. In rehab, I was destroyed, crushed by the pain. I was sweaty, sticky, greasy. It was horrible, maybe to walk 20 metres five times in a day between parallel bars. Then, on my way home I would see guys out jogging, and I would be a little envious. 'Man', I would say, 'I remember the days when I could do that', but I never had a day when I spent the entire time looking at the ceiling and saying, 'Man, I wish I could have my legs back'. I feel fortunate." 

ADAM SCHAECHTER is in his late 30s, but his hair is nearly all grey now. Too many days trying to make racing cars go faster, he would say, too many seasons like 2001, when a car you know can go fast is going slow, and everybody is getting tired and frustrated. The season had hit an all-time low in Portland, and there had been some tough talking in the Mo Nunn-owned team. By Cleveland, the mood had begun to change, and when the circus set off for their first trip to Germany, for the first time in a long season there was a genuine sense of optimism. 

Schaechter, a quietly spoken Californian, still has the data on that weekend. It shows that of the 50 fastest laps in the race, 40 were driven by Zanardi or his teammate, Tony Kanaan. "We hit it right from the first session," Schaechter recalls, still smiling. The telemetry also told the story. The beacons that produce the readings are placed on the inside of the track, but because Zanardi was passing so many cars on the outside, there were blanks where the figures should have been. 
"We knew we had the car to win the race," Schaechter reflects. "When Alex came in for his last stop, he pitted out of the lead. It was a good stop, you knew it without looking at the clock, and Alex was flying. He wanted that lead back." But his mind goes blank for the next hour, like his television monitor and his radio. He knew it was bad, the whole pit lane knew it was bad. If there had been a telemetric reading for shock, the line would have gone off the graph. 

Schaechter cannot even remember whether the race finished under a yellow flag, or who won. All he can remember is the heavy drinking session that night in the hotel bar and a long, difficult, drive up to the hospital in Berlin the next day. 
They could not see Zanardi, but instinctively they knew that's what they wanted to do. The team pulled out of the next race in Rockingham. Schaechter thought that was wrong. But a year or so later, he was still between jobs when the phone rang. It was Lee Dykstra from Cart wondering if he would put his mind to designing a racing car for a man with artificial legs. "He asked me what I was doing. I said, 'Well, if that's the issue, getting Alex back in a racing car, nothing'." From nothing, they produced a car, testing it for the first time on a cold day at Indianapolis barely three weeks ago, then again at the Vauxhall test track in Millbrook, with Zanardi at the wheel for the first time. But Friday night was the real test, with the band back together again. Chuck Buckman, who knows more about fixing racing cars than almost any man alive, and who built this one in less than a month, and Robin Hill, Zanardi's engineer from the Ganassi days, and Schaechter. Nobody really knows where the money came from or how it all came together. The project had an emotional momentum all of its own. 

ZANARDI lives in Monte Carlo with Daniella and Niccolo. After his horrific crash, surgeons amputated both his legs above the knee and he was put in an artificial coma for three days. While he was unconscious, with the priest ready to read the last rites, Daniella was calling BMW to arrange the delivery of a car with manual controls. "When he wakes, he will want to drive. I know," she said. 

Now, she sits at the table as her husband talks. "My friends always say that when I am with Daniella, I can disconnect the brain," he laughs. "It's true, she's much more intelligent than me. She's my example, because it was much harder for her than for me. She's been very strong, so has my son. But people who say I did this for them are wrong. I did it for me. The minute I woke up and she told me what happened, I said, 'Holy shit', excuse me, and then I said, 'I've got a problem, let's work on it', like we were setting up a car." His rehab was completed at a centre near Bologna, which meant that sometimes he could go back to his village and see Bonini, the owner of the local motorbike shop who had persuaded Alex's father to buy a go-kart for his son all those years ago. The barber's shop is a shrine to the village's most famous son. "It's nice," laughs Zanardi. "It just takes a long time to have a haircut." 

Every two weeks, he drives to Milan to record a television programme about F1. He is also starting a business with a friend, building a go-kart chassis and writing a book, which he thinks he'll call With My Foot Still On The Gas. 

"And there are always charity things. Every half-hour, the phone rings: 'Alex, it's the year of the disabled and we've had this idea . . . ' I can't do everything, but I do the best I can. I work 20 times harder than I used to do when I was a race car driver. Then I always had the excuse that I was preparing for a race. Not now." 

It was partly because of Niccolo that he solved the problem of braking a 750bhp Champ Car. They went go-karting together, and for a bet, Zanardi had his feet strapped to the brake pedal of the kart and began to race. "I found I could drive the kart, easing the throttle when I needed to in the corners, touching the brakes just the amount to get it sideways." When he got home, he put the bathroom scales against the wall, propped himself against the bath and pushed hard. He registered 85kg of pressure, easily enough to work a power brake system. 

"Alex wanted to know this whole project was for real," says Schaechter, and from that moment it was. The place and the timing were also his own work. "I wasn't concerned about coming back here," explains Zanardi, "I was curious what I would feel, and when I drove into the circuit I began to recognise different things, but that's nice. I have no problems." Nor any discernible fear as he slipped awkwardly, arms held, into the familiar cockpit last Friday evening. "Okay, just kidding, it's all a joke," he laughed. 

But you only had to look at the faces of his old pit crew to know it wasn't. And it will be the same today. "I don't have to break the track record," he says quietly. "It's just about the principle, about the idea that there's not much you can't do if you really want it. You can do a lot. Not everything, but a lot." This, he says, is an end, not a beginning. The end of the longest pit stop in motor racing history.