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Quit While You're Ahead

Auto Racing Digest, Sept, 2000 by William Wagner

A WORD OF ADVICE TO ANY driver who captures a big-league championship: Retire immediately! If recent history is any indication, it's all downhill from there.

Take the collapse of Juan Montoya's career. In 1999 he set new standards for excellence in CART, winning a rookie-record seven races en route to the title. The future seemed boundless for the 24-year-old Colombian hotshot.

Until the 2000 season commenced, that is. Suddenly, the guy who set the pace in 1999 is running at roughly the same speed as the pace car. How far down in the standings has he plummeted? As marquee drivers like Paul Tracy, Jimmy Vasser, and Max Papis have been battling for the title, Montoya has been trying to get a leg up on guys like Oriol Servia, Shinji Nakano, and Memo Gidley, a veritable alphabet soup of backmarkers.

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The May race in Motegi, Japan, was reflective of Montoya's disappointments. After leading all but three of the first 175 laps, his Toyota-powered racer--which last year featured a less delicate Honda engine--succumbed to his ultra-aggressive nature, dropping him out of contention. It's tough to win when you spend more time behind the wall than on the track.

NASCAR Winston Cup's Dale Jarrett also has had a rough ride in 2000 after winning the title last season, although his decline has been much less dramatic than Montoya's. Jarrett started 2000 in a manner befitting a champion, by winning the prestigious Daytona 500. After that, however, he had difficulty coming within sniffing distance of Victory Lane, and up-and-comers like Bobby Labonte, Ward Burton, and Jeff Burton blew by him in the standings. The best Jarrett can possibly hope for in 2000 a top-five finish in the points.

Then there is Alex Zanardi, whose woes we chronicle in a feature beginning on page 20. After winning the CART championship in 1997 and '98, the Italian became one of the most famous drivers on the planet. It seemed natural, then, for him to test his skills in the worldwide arena of Formula One.

Big mistake. Zanardi's tenure with the prestigious Williams F1 team was an unqualified disaster; he failed to score a single point in 1999. He was so bad, in fact, that Williams didn't re-sign him for the 2000 campaign.

Now Zanardi is out of racing altogether. He followed our advice, it seems--but a year too late to preserve his legacy.

Quit While You're Ahead

Auto Racing Digest, Sept, 2000 by William Wagner

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