Alex
Zanardi

Alessandro Leone Zanardi was born in Bologna on 23 October 1966. He began karting at 13 and won the CIK-FIA European Championship in 1987. After a spell in Italian Formula Three and victory in the FIA European F3 Cup in 1990, he finished runner-up to Christian Fittipaldi in the 1991 Formula 3000 championship, with three wins.

In Formula One he started 41 races without ever reaching the podium. He drove the last three races of 1991 for Jordan and in 1992 stood in for the injured Christian Fittipaldi at Minardi. He joined Lotus in 1993, helped fine-tune the team's active suspension and scored his only championship point with sixth place in Brazil. A crash in practice for the Belgian Grand Prix ended his season early. In 1994 he missed the start of the year and came in at the Spanish Grand Prix to replace Pedro Lamy, in what was Lotus's final Formula One season.

In 1996 he joined Chip Ganassi Racing in CART. He took three wins and six pole positions, finished third in the championship and was named Rookie of the Year. In the season finale at Laguna Seca he won with an overtake on Bryan Herta at the Corkscrew, a manoeuvre that was banned afterwards. He won the CART title in 1997 and 1998 and took 15 race wins in the series.

He returned to Formula One with Williams in 1999 but did not score a point, and the two parted company after the season. In 2001 he suffered a serious accident during the CART race at the Lausitzring on 15 September. From 2003 he raced again with prosthetic legs, first in the European Touring Car Championship and from 2005 in the World Touring Car Championship, where he won four races before ending his WTCC career in 2009.

As a handcyclist he won two gold medals each at the 2012 Paralympics in London and the 2016 Games in Rio, along with twelve para-cycling world titles between 2013 and 2019. In June 2020 he was involved in a serious accident during a handcycle race. Zanardi died in Padua on 1 May 2026, aged 59.

Source: Wikipedia, “Alex Zanardi”. Text licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.