1,000 Greatest Drivers: Cristiano da Matta

What's da matta?

I never thought da Matta quite received his due from race fans in general, but I definitely get why because he dominated CART when CART was starting to suck. While the IRL races were barnburners all season, the CART races were almost uniformly boring at best and reprehensible (Surfer’s Paradise) at worst. That CART season was largely ruined by a stupid, stupid decision to have mandatory pit windows, which nullified any real race strategy that could have made some of those parades more interesting, and the fact that they still utilized the mandatory pit windows at Surfer’s Paradise even though almost the entire race was under caution resulted in Mario Domínguez winning one of the stupidest races in motorsports history. It didn’t help that ESPN stopped broadcasting CART races after 2001 so races were relegated to an early NASCAR-esque Frankenstein schedule with races on either CBS or the SPEED Channel at a time when SPEED was either unavailable in many areas or otherwise on extremely expensive cable packages if so (I don’t think SPEED was even available in my area at the time). You’d think maybe da Matta would get a lot of hype just for his win at Fontana in 2001 since that race had more lead changes than any other IndyCar race to that point (although the 2015 Fontana race broke that record), but that didn’t really happen either. I think many people ended up not taking the results of the Handford device races seriously, much like NASCAR restrictor plate races. But the 2002 CART season still had really strong competition, strong enough that Paul Tracy, Tony Kanaan, and Scott Dixon all finished outside the top ten in points. I guess history is written by the winners and the IRL won the split albeit in a pyrrhic victory, so the drivers who never competed in it were increasingly forgotten. However, the same thing didn’t happen with either Alex Zanardi or Greg Moore’s career and I would definitely rate da Matta over Zanardi, so I find da Matta’s career befuddling in general. One thing I will acknowledge: he belongs on this list.