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Originally Posted by formerf1champ
Next, you'll be telling me about the time Eddie Cheever won a race...
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The most accomplished American driver in Formula One in the last 30 years? There's a lot of good F1 drivers out there that didn't get 9 podiums in Grand Prix. And it's hardly like he was uncompetitive when you look at his CART record racing for Ganassi before Ganassi was a top team.
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I remember the days when Lazier was just a no name who ran at the back of the field. The feeling of stunned surprise stayed with me the whole day at the realisation he won Indy (even if it wasn't a real one!).
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Well when you can only afford crap cars, you're not exactly going to win. Geez, you have "F1" in your user name, so that means you follow the series and should know that.
He was racing a 2-year-old Lola with the ticking time bomb Buick engine for Leader Cards in 1993 for example.
(One thing I very clearly remember about old CART was the class structure, there were haves and there were have nots, and the difference between the two was much wider than the difference between Lotus and Honda/Chevy in this year's Indycar series. It was more like the difference between McLaren and HRT in modern F1. You look at some old race footage on Youtube, take a look at how far back some of the qualifying times were once you get to say 10th or so.)
The man was good at Indy. I was at the 2005 race and he took a worthless POS Chevy engine to 5th place in a one-off drive for Panther. Looking at his other results he got 4th in 1997, 2nd behind Cheever in 1998, and 2nd behind Montoya in 2000. Honestly though, if he crashes in 1996 during the 500 with his existing back injury, he could've easily been paralyzed. So you have that hanging over your head and you go out and win the race? That takes balls. Other guys that have done something comparable to that: Rick Mears when he went to the hospital in a bad accident and came back the next day to set pole speed.