Zanardi wins two ways at Detroit

Monday, June 8, 1998 | 9:11 a.m.

Alex Zanardi drove two very different races during the ITT Automotive Detroit Grand Prix.

In the first race, the defending CART FedEx Series champion pressured his closest rival in this year's title chase into a series of uncharacteristic mistakes.

Then, showing he can change his tactics as quickly as his car can downshift from 180 to 30 mph, Zanardi became Mr. Conservative.

The strategy worked as the Italian driver pulled away from the field to win Sunday's race and raise his lead over Moore from six to 17 points.

Moore, a 23-year-old Canadian, has raced wheel-to-wheel with Zanardi several times this season, passing him for a win last month in Brazil.

The youngster started Sunday's 72-lap race from the pole, with Zanardi alongside, and stayed on top until he made his first pit stop near the end of lap 23 on Belle Isle Raceway's 2.346-mile, 14-turn street circuit.

During the ensuing action, Zanardi was rarely as much as a second behind.

"I tried to pressure Greg into a mistake and I saw him brush the wall two or three times," Zanardi said, grinning.

"Running behind him in the early laps, I could run his pace, but at a leaner (fuel) mixture. That gave us the margin we needed. When he stopped, I knew I still had enough fuel for two more laps, so I tried very hard to make those two laps as fast as possible."

Zanardi pitted on lap 25 and came back onto the track 2.7 seconds ahead of Moore.

"The first lap after you pit, you are on cold tires and, especially on a tough course like this, it is hard enough just to keep the car off the walls and get some heat into the tires," Zanardi explained.

"By staying out one extra lap, I was able to take advantage of the situation and build on my lead with Greg coming out on cold tires."

Of course, the situation was reversed after Zanardi pitted, with the Italian driver then battling the cold tires for his first trip around the road course.

"That is the tradeoff," Zanardi said as he celebrated his third win of the year. "I gained an advantage on Greg by staying out, and then I had to work very hard and be very careful to keep it."

Zanardi led the rest of the way, celebrating with his victory trademark, a series of donuts -- spinning his car round and round -- that sent tire smoke boiling into the air as the crowd cheered.

"After we came out ahead of Greg, it was a question of trying to avoid all the bad things that can happen to you on a street course," the winner said.

Despite changes to the course to try to make it easier for the competitors to pass, most of the event looked more like a parade than a race. But it was a busy parade, with Zanardi and everyone else working hard to hold position and stay between the concrete barriers lining the course.

After his first stop, there was little doubt that Zanardi would take the 11th victory of his CART career. Thanks to two full-course caution flags, he didn't even have to worry about conserving fuel.

The first of those yellows came out on lap 43 when Paul Tracy tapped Christian Fittipaldi and sent him spinning. Fittipaldi wound up stalled in the middle of the track and had to be towed into the pits.

All the leaders made their second and last pit stops during the ensuing caution. Zanardi made another quick stop and Moore had a fuel hose problem that cost him track position and knocked him out of contention.

Jerry Forsythe, Moore's car-owner, said, "In Greg's last stop, the fuel should have vented, but it didn't. As a result of that pit stop, we lost two spots. We also had either a fuel flow problem or a fuel consumption problem. We're going to have to analyze the data to see what the problem was."

Adrian Fernandez came out of the last series of stops in second place, and that's where he remained, finishing 6.624 seconds behind. Gil de Ferran was third for the third straight time at Detroit, followed by Dario Franchitti, Moore and Zanardi's teammate, Jimmy Vasser.

Zanardi held a lead of only 1.44 seconds over Fernandez before Richie Hearn's blown engine brought out another caution flag on lap 50. But, after the green flag waved again for the start of lap 56, the leader was able to forget about saving fuel and steadily pulled away.

Zanardi, who came into the race with a six-point advantage over Moore in the series standings, now leads 113-96 after eight of 19 races. Vasser remained third, 33 back, followed another five points behind by Fernandez.

This was the third consecutive victory for Target-Chip Ganassi Racing, with Zanardi winning two weeks ago at Madison, Ill., and Vasser winning last week at Milwaukee.

CANADIAN GP:The staid, predictable Formula One series got a nice dose of chaos and controversy from someone whose name begins with "M." Mika? Nope. McLaren? Not a chance. In the Canadian Grand Prix in Montreal on Sunday, Michael Schumacher shook up the whole season with some spectacular driving and the rhetoric to match. The German star steered clear of two smoky melees in the treacherous first turn at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, then brushed off a penalty for hogging the road as he veered out of the pits. To cap it all off, Schumacher dusted rival Damon Hill, got his last pit stop right and drove to his second victory of the season. The mighty McLaren team of David Coulthard and points leader Mika Hakkinen, winners of five of the first six races, got knocked out with mechanical problems on a hectic day of attrition in Montreal. Maybe it's time to say "au revoir" to all this talk about F-1's boring monotony. "Now my situation in the championship looks much better than it did before this race," said Schumacher, who passed polesitter Coulthard for second place in the point standings with 34. Schumacher, the two-time series champion, trails Hakkinen by 12 points with 10 races remaining. His Ferrari teammate, Eddie Irvine, closed within 10 points of Coulthard with his fourth third-place finish of the season. Giancarlo Fisichella was second in his Benetton on a cold, cloudy day.LE MANS 24 HOURS:Porsche proved that experience and not just endurance is the key to success in the Le Mans 24 Hour race in France. Two hours from the end, Toyota seemed set for its first Le Mans triumph, but pressure from two Porsche cars, followed by a late Toyota disaster, sent the crown to the German constructor for a record 16th time. Porsche got the break it needed to win its third straight title when the leading Toyota GT1 withdrew with gearbox problems less than 90 minutes before the end of the race. The Porsche GT1 driven by Britain's Alan McNish and France's Laurent Aiello and Stephane Ortelli won the 66th Le Mans, covering the 8.456-mile circuit 351 times. It went 2,972 miles at an average of 124.577 mph. "We were pushing our car to the limit, and hoped that the Toyota would make a mistake," McNish said. "We needed to see if they could take the pressure. They couldn't." Another Porsche GT1, driven by Germany's Jorg Muller and Uwe Alzen and France's Bob Wolleck, was second -- completing 350 laps. Finishing third -- three laps down -- was the Nissan R390 driven by Japan's Kazuyoshi Hoshino, Aguri Suzuki and Masahiko Kageyama.

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