THE A TO Z OF A HERO’S DTM CAMEO
Alex Zanardi’s guest outing for BMW at Misano was about much more than his drive to an emotional fifth position. It represented a big step in technology for disabled racers
“To ask me whether I want to drive a car is like asking a cat if he likes a mouse”
Alex Zanardi never won at Misano in his Italian
Formula 3 days, but this would surely be a nice, simple, back-to-hisroots venue on which to compete in a one-off
DTM event for BMW. Or so thought the manufacturer’s sports chief Jens Marquardt.
Not so. You see, not only has the layout been changed since the 51-year-old (who has since turned 52) Indycar champion,
Paralympic gold medallist and all-round sporting hero battled his way around there in the late 1980s and early ’90s, it has also switched from anti-clockwise to clockwise…
“When Jens called, one of the first things he said was, ‘This will all happen on a friendly, familiar circuit for you, because
I know that you know Misano very well’,” laughs Zanardi. “And I said, ‘Yeah, I’ve raced there a thousand times, but they changed it’. So that wasn’t a point in our favour – but better going to Misano than doing a race on the Nurburgring Nordschleife, for example!”
The plan had been hatched at Easter. Zanardi, who lost his legs in that shocking Indycar crash at Lausitzring in 2001, has a long association with BMW dating back to his international racing comeback in the World Touring Car Championship, in which he notched up four wins during the 2000s for the Munich firm. More recently, he has taken part in GT3 competition – including the Spa 24 Hours – with the BMW Z4.
“I thought Jens was just calling up to give me his wishes,” continues Zanardi, “because he’s normally very kind. But he had a proposal. And because I’m a race car driver, to ask me whether I want to drive a car is like asking a cat if he likes a mouse. My first reaction was like, ‘Wow, are you sure?’ We had been talking several times about the Daytona 24 Hours in 2019, which had already been announced, and so when he just dropped DTM into the conversation I wasn’t sure that I’d understood correctly. DTM is a championship in which you don’t have any ‘old glories’, or let’s say gentleman drivers like you normally find in GT racing. We’re talking about DTM: it’s only professional race drivers. “It was going to be tough, I knew, but Jens said, ‘No Alex, we have total confidence that you can get the job done. This will be an opportunity for us to go a little further in what we’re doing, developing the new set of instruments that will hopefully allow you to drive the car better. If we can achieve this, then I have no doubts that you won’t look like an idiot. You will do your job’.”
Even with a pedigree such as his, that was a real risk for Zanardi. There is no championship anywhere in the world outside Formula 1 with a better field of drivers than DTM. How would a driver with his disabilities, just a bit-part racer in recent years, cope with the challenge? The BMW crew set to work.
“Over the distance of a single lap, I think I was pretty close to being given the opportunity to deliver my talent to the best of my abilities,” says Zanardi of his old method of using his prosthetic legs to operate the pedals, “but it was very tiring for me to have to stay in the car for longer than a lap. This is down to the fact that your limbs are completely trapped into a couple of sockets, which does not allow the transpiration and temperature exchange, so my body temperature keeps rising and rising to the point where it becomes very hard for me to stay in the car.
“Driving the BMW 320 in WTCC, that car did not even have a sequential gearbox – just an H-pattern. So of course, approaching the turns I had to use my right hand to downshift onto the gearstick. That’s why
it was really necessary for me to use my leg, because I could not do everything with my hands – it was too much. But with these modern cars, you have a semi-automatic gearbox, so it’s very easy to just put a button or trigger somewhere to control the downshifting action. It was the end of 2015, with one of the engineers Sebastian Meyer, who works in Munich. I said, ‘Sebastian, I need to step into the car without my legs’. That’s why I immediately suggested the BMW M6 or M8 – at the time I didn’t even think about the DTM car. I said it should be quite easy to design a brake lever, and put a trigger behind it to downshift. Whether
I’m going to be able to brake efficiently, or too much because pressure is needed to slow the car down, is a question mark.
“So they went home and designed the bits. There was no need to do it for 2016 because I was engaged with the Paralympic games, and the project was placed on hold a little bit. But then in 2017 we picked it up again, we went to test the parts in an M6, and from the very first test I realised the choice was right. Immediately I was able to stay in the car much longer than I imagined. I completed 700km in one day, which is not just remarkable, it’s beyond expectations.”
Now it was a question of getting Zanardi comfortably into the M4 DTM, a task that was led by BMW DTM chassis chief Gordian von Schoning. “We were very happy when Jens asked us to help him implement Alex
in the car,” says von Schoning. “We started with making a bespoke seat because this is very important. From then on we started to find a position where he could reach everything easily.
“Alex came here to our facility and we made an imprint of his butt and his body and his back. The main target is that he had almost no clearance. Normally you try to fix the driver in the car, no movement, and this is what we did here. Alex came to us and he was already spreading his good ‘atmosphere’, his funny mood, and everybody loved him and it was easy to convince other people to work with him, even if it was beside our normal workload.
“At first we were thinking about the main topic: can he still use his artificial legs for anything? And he said, ‘No I don’t really need them; I have the power in my arms and in my upper body’, And this brought us to a situation where we said, ‘OK, we need to find a way in which he can brake and implement the pedal box into his arms’.
“When we designed the parts, we figured out that he was really strong in his upper body and his arms, but we really had to make sure that he could use the normal DTM brake system because we didn’t want to change that. We made a measurement of how much pressure he can put on the brake system, and how long should be the lever, and all these kind of things. At that time we already knew that he had to do a race, and you have to keep the power for one hour. So worst case: if it’s too much power in his arms, you have no brakes at the end of the race.
“He was extremely strong – it was almost 70kg [of pressure], which was easy for him. Maximum power was 120kg [with both hands]. I also tried it and I could hardly reach 90kg! He said, ‘I feel comfortable with 70kg’, and then we said, ‘OK that’s a good thing’, otherwise we had to make a huge lever and he would have to shift it a long way. From then on we designed the lever using topological optimisation – the best mixture of materials for his maximum strength.
“We made an imprint of a wax model of his hand. We asked him to grab a stick out of wax and we blueprinted his hand in this stick, and skimmed the stick and dropped this into the cast again, so the lever itself had the imprint of Alex’s hand – just to reduce the force on his hand.”
These systems were fitted into a
BMW test car – a factory warhorse with a monocoque dating back to 2013 – that would be Zanardi’s Misano weapon. “But that doesn’t mean it’s not good,” points out von Schoning. “The car was in good shape, with proper lifing of the parts.” Zanardi would be run under the banner of BMW Team RMR, the ‘fictional’ squad – mainly for the purposes of scoring points in the teams’ championship – that supposedly fields Timo Glock and Philipp Eng, although their cars are actually operated by RMG and RBM respectively. Zanardi’s car would be put on track by MTEK, which runs the manufacturer’s World Endurance Championship programme with the
M8 GTE that he will race at Daytona in January. The mechanics were a mixture
of RMG and RBM personnel.
Training-wise, Zanardi asserts that “I didn’t do anything extra to prepare specifically”, thanks to his main sporting activity: handbike racing. “Bear in mind, training for me is a daily exercise,” he says. “With my handcycle you can basically train every single muscle of your body. It’s a unique instrument, which should really be the perfect instrument for a race car driver. Then on top I swim a lot, I do cross-country skiing in the winter. For the level of fitness that can be reached at 51 years of age, I’m not far from the best I can do.”
Before the race weekend at Misano,
BMW took Zanardi a little further south to Vallelunga to get some testing in and try out the new systems. “A DTM machine is pretty demanding from a physical point of view, but I was basically able to wear the car out,” says Zanardi. “I did a couple of days, covering 1200km – and I would never have been able to do that with the old set of equipment.”
Was he fast enough though? “We still
“Alex came to us and was already spreading his good ‘atmosphere’. Everybody loved him”
couldn’t really figure out his performance,” says von Schoning. “We had tested before at Vallelunga with the same car, but that test was very short and we had some problems with rain. That was a bit of a problem. He was happy with the car, but we still didn’t really know if he had the pace or the possibility to be competitive.”
Zanardi recalls a time when the inverse happened, when his old mate Vincenzo Sospiri joined Dan Gurney’s Eagle team for some late-season Indycar races in 1998, the year of Zanardi’s second title. “I felt as prepared for Misano as you can be, without considering my disability, my age, my lack of specific experience,” says Zanardi. “I’ve been in the opposite situation. Vincenzo was an excellent driver. We had dinner together, and he thought he could take the opportunity to boost his career into a new direction. I didn’t want to tell him, but I feared that for him to come to a championship towards the end of the year, with everybody up to speed and so specialised in what they are doing, would be an obstacle too big for him to overcome.
“The day after qualifying at Surfers Paradise, where I was over four seconds faster than him, he looked at me like he’d seen a ghost. ‘How the hell do you go this fast?’ There was no magic, other than knowing exactly what to do with that machine, with 1000bhp on the track, negotiating the car around tight walls and a difficult circuit. As good as I was, he had no specific experience and he was completely lost in that field.
“That was the thing I was fearing the most. I hadn’t been in a race in nearly two years, I didn’t know anything about DTM, and I was a little bit prepared for a nightmare for those reasons. Not to mention my disability, my age, and I have to say the weather on top didn’t help…
Every single session we had different conditions, which for me was a big obstacle.”
Ah yes, the weather. It was said that part of the lure of Misano, and night-time racing, for the DTM was the attraction of nearby Rimini, a very popular resort with German holidaymakers. (A bit like a BTCC race in Benidorm – how about it, Alan Gow?!) But that was counting without an uncharacteristic burst of late-august Adriatic rain.
“When you know everything and you have a new weather condition, it’s quite easy to switch strategy and adapt, if you’re one
with the car you’re driving,” explains Zanardi. “But I was everything but at one with my car. I was a passenger most of the time, and with everybody coming in my mirrors very rapidly it was a bit of a nightmare.”
Zanardi finished at the back of the field in Saturday’s wet-dry race, but then came a breakthrough in free practice on Sunday, when the weather finally improved. Amazingly, he was fifth quickest – and faster than all six of the regular BMW drivers. OK, he finished fifth that night in the race, which began in streaming wet conditions, dried out a bit, and then finished amid further rain. But that was down to circumstances. It was the free practice performance that really impressed.
“For me that was the highlight of the weekend,” he says, “because I have to admit the race result came with a little bit of luck. Frankly, I was surprised to be the fastest of the BMWS – I know how competitive these drivers are. Don’t get me wrong, I know I’m a good driver, I know I’ve been good enough to win races at nearly every level, but it was kind of unexpected to be able to compete that well with that type of machine.”
He then explains that, bearing in mind his background in high-downforce singleseaters, he never felt truly comfortable in the old WTCC or GT3 machinery. Pure-bred racing machinery such as DTM is much more his thing… “I had to torture myself a little bit driving a GT, even worse a touring car. You’re driving a machine which is quite similar to an old car, which in some ways is easier to drive, but for me it isn’t. I’d been driving single-seaters all my life, cars with a lot of downforce. I’ve learned that technique to take advantage of the downforce, when very often you have to roll the car into the corner and take as much speed as possible.
“That extra aerodynamic pressure on the back of your car produces more grip. When you try to drive a GT car in that way, you’re just wasting time because the car simply won’t do that – she doesn’t know how to. Going back into a DTM car, which handles very similar to a Formula 2 car I would say, wow – it was like going back to my usual office. Right from Vallelunga, I could extract joy out of every corner, every lap; pure pleasure from driving the car. I didn’t have to force myself to be fast in that machine – it was very natural.” There was also a bit of good old Zanardi canniness – a throwback to his days as a two-time Indycar champion, where the driver influences strategy as much as the team. Recall that BMW rookie Joel Eriksson won that Sunday-night race: he was the only driver to start on slick tyres, so when it began to dry out he stayed out on track. Then, when it rained again, he was able to dive pitwards and make his mandatory stop onto grooved wet-weather Hankooks. Zanardi was one of just four who stayed out on their wets, and simply had more wets fitted when it rained again. The others all went wets-slicks-wets, got lapped in the process, and then got well and truly hammered by an ill-timed safety car. That was why Zanardi took a comfortable fifth place – that, and his intuition.
“I could extract joy out of every corner, every lap; pure pleasure from driving the car”
“I was supposed to stop [for slicks], and I radioed the team that I was going in,” he recalls. “There is a big floodlight on the outside of Turn 14 and I could see a huge kind of fog around the lamp, and I could see it was raining down there. It was enough to stay out another lap, so I radioed again and said, ‘I’m staying out’, and that was it.
“That was my call – it saved us an extra pitstop, which would have killed my race. I knew that I had finished well, although I didn’t know the exact position because of all the chaos on the final lap. In reality, I was talking with a little bit of irony
[when he expressed shock over the radio about his result]!”
Watching the on-track action at
Misano was Billy Monger, the BRDC
British Formula 3 frontrunner who has raced with prosthetic legs this year after sustaining terrible injuries in April 2017. “He came and met me while I was preparing for the World Paralympic championships,” says Zanardi. “We had a whole day there and we had the time to hang around together and talk. I’m very impressed by his maturity, his determination – not so much to overcome what happened to him, because that in my view is already behind him, but more in trying to take advantage of all that happened to boost his career.
“He has better instruments than I do, because he has one knee. It makes a big difference, but it’s like a metaphorical team relay: I believe every disabled person who tries to do things is basically changing people’s perceptions and proving once more that we are all limited somehow. We all are – it’s just more evident when you’ve lost a part of your body.
“With our intelligence we’ve been able to fly, to think well beyond the imaginable. One of the people who has been able to reach furthest into the universe is Stephen Hawking, a guy who had nothing other than his sight. With his mind, he was able to overcome his disability and discover stuff, and the whole of mankind owes him a great deal of gratitude. I think the perfect life is not a collection of amazing results, but a collection of amazing attempts. This is what you have to do: sit down and work out a plan; get off your butt and do what you can. This is the type of guy Billy Monger is.”
And also the type of guy Alex Zanardi is. Thanks to his recent exploits culminating in the DTM, BMW has come up with a system whereby “with these new set-up solutions, anybody with good hands and arms can step into my car and drive it.
We’ve been able to develop a set of instruments which could be a fantastic starting point for a disabled driver, or even an able-bodied driver with just their hands.”
And perform well. A genius as he was, Professor Hawking likely wouldn’t have been able to steer a DTM car around
Misano at Zanardi’s rate – either clockwise, or anti-clockwise.