The year 1995 marked the end of a hegemony, when for the first time a Reynard chassis won the championship with the young driver Jacques Villeneuve. That car champion of the “Player's Forsythe” team was powered by a Ford engine.
But in 1996 the successes of the duo Reynard Honda began. The Target Chip Ganassi Racing team had Jimmy Vasser and Alex Zanardi as drivers. This was the second year of pilot Jimmy Vasser on the Ganessi team. The American driver was champion with a fairly moderate campaign in achievements, with 4 poles and 4 victories in the races of Homestead, Long Beach, Australia and Michigan.
The second Ganessi rider, the Italian Alex Zanardi, was a CART debutant brought to the team by the Reynard company. Zanardi was third in the championship despite having dedicated himself to developing new chassis components. He scored with great merit 6 poles (4 consecutive) and 3 victories to achieve a total of 6 finals on the podium.
In the 1997 season Alex Zanardi was the well-deserved CART champion with a record of 4 poles and 5 races won (Long Beach, Cleveland, Michigan, Mid-Ohio and Road America). His teammate Jimmy Vasser placed third in the standings with a single win and 5 podiums.
The year 1998 was the best in the sports career of the Italian rider. Your exploits behind the wheel of the unbeatable Reynard 98I will remain for the memory forever. Zanardi dominated the season completely, was champion with 285 points and over 100 points ahead of the second. Zanardi scored 7 victories and climbed to the podium 15 times. Vasser was the second of the championship with 2 poles and 3 victories.
By this time, the Reynard Honda was the car to beat. The reliability and stability of the Reynard chassis were exceptional. In turn, the Honda V8 turbo engine of 2,650 cm3 displacement had a power in the order of 850 hp at a speed of 14,000 rpm.
In the 1999 season Chip Ganessi's team saw their star driver Alex Zanardi march towards Formula 1, more precisely the Williams team. His place in the Target Ganessi team was occupied by an ascending star, Colombian driver Juan Pablo Montoya.
In his first season in the CART category, Montoya dazzled the category with his results and put himself in the eye of the world of sports motorsport. As a debut in such a contest, Montoya scored a record of 7 wins and 7 poles during the 1999 season. The Reynard Honda was still a dominant car.
When the owner of the most successful team in the history of the CART understood that his chassis was no longer competitive, he had to accept the defeat and take a 180 degree turn. For the 2000 season the Penske team purchased Reynard chassis with Honda engines. And the change brought fortune.
Brazilian Gil de Ferran was the champion of the 2000 season with 2 wins, 5 poles and 7 podiums. Teammate Helio Castroneves scored 3 wins. The Penske team was once again the protagonist of the CART. While using chassis purchased from Reynard, Roger Penske had engineers working and performing experimental modifications to get the maximum performance the car could give.
The 2001 season was again successful for Penske. Once again Gil de Ferran would be champion, again with 2 wins and 8 finals on the podium. Castroneves won three wins and finished in fourth place of the championship. That same year, Penske announced his retirement from the CART category to join the rival Indy Racing League category. Commercial commitments drove Penske, one of the founders of the CART category, away leaving a huge gap.
The statistics left a total of 6 championships won by the Reynard-Honda combination and a total of 8 titles for the manufacturer Reynard.
Subsequently, the category would go through a major economic crisis that would lead it to bankruptcy. This situation left the Lola-Ford combination as the only vehicle alternative. The current category name is Champ Car.
© Adrián Blanco 2006 — Prohibited the total or partial reproduction of text and/or images without explicit written consent of the author. —
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