Anybody's game

摘要

The irony of an exacting science like major-league auto racing is in its unpredictability, a trait that colored the mid-1998 results just as it has so many past campaigns. In spite of endless testing, enhanced by increasingly sophisticated onboard telemetry, and in spite of precision hardware worthy of NASA, random variables —human factors not least among them—invariably reduce preseason forecasting to educated guesswork, some of it accurate, some not. For example, many observers confidently saw the PacWest team as the best bet to challenge Alex Zanardi and Chip Ganassi-Target Racing for the Fedex CART championship.