Zanardi's Team Withdraw Car from Rockingham Race

Alex Zanardi's Honda-Reynard team will run with just one car at Saturday's Rockingham 500 CART race after the Italian's horrific crash.

"We're not going to run the 66 car this weekend," team owner Mo Nunn said in a statement issued at the English circuit. Two times CART champion Zanardi lost both legs in his high-speed crash at the Lausitzring on Saturday, and has since been in a Berlin hospital in an artificially-induced coma.

Doctors say his situation is no longer life-threatening but still critical. They started the slow process of bringing him out of the coma on Tuesday evening and said Zanardi is expected to remain in intensive care for the next week to 15 days.

"Alex's wife Daniela would very much like the show to go on ... especially since both Alex and Tony (Kanaan) were running so well in Germany until the accident happened," Nunn said. "She feels there is unfinished business to tend to at Rockingham.

"However, some of the guys on the team are understandably so devastated by what happened that we believe it would be difficult to fully concentrate on the task at hand. And that could pose a safety risk as we compete on another oval track this weekend.

"Last week's tragic events back home in the States were tremendously unsettling, as it was. And the accident Saturday was just a terrible thing to endure for us all. The best thing to do is send the number 66 team home early, take the proper time to get themselves together and to come back strong at Houston."

The team said Zanardi's car was expected to be back in action at Houston on Oct 4-6 with a driver yet to be determined.

Tagliani Devastated

Meanwhile, Canadian Alex Tagliani is a haunted man, hoping to find some calm between concrete walls at 320km/h. Four days after he emerged miraculously from the horrific crash the 28-year-old CART driver remains in mental turmoil.

"There is not five minutes during the day when I don't think about Alex," he said at the Rockingham circuit in central England ahead of Saturday's next CART race.

"I'm just trying to take this out of my head. I don't want to even think of my problems right now. They are 100 times less than what Alex is going through."

There was nothing Tagliani could do about it, given only a split-second to react as Zanardi's car spun across the track on leaving the pits.

"We talk about it and it seems a long period of time, but he went on the track and bang," said Tagliani, recalling what happened. "The data shows that I turned really hard to the left and locked the brakes when I saw I was not able to do anything else. And that's about it."

Danger comes in many guises and Tagliani's life is full of ironies. He shrank back on Wednesday from a cold buffet, explaining how he has a peanut allergy so serious that one mouthful of an innocent-looking sauce could kill him in minutes.

And yet he could not wait to be back on track, dicing with rivals and brushing concrete walls at terrifying speeds.

"When I start running, my head will be thinking about so many things -- the setup, a lot of things -- I will be concentrating on driving so much that I will be happy," he said.

"When I am on the track I don't see any problem. It's just that if somebody talks to me about it or if I am by myself in my hotel room and thinking about him - that is more of a problem for me.

"The toughest part is during the day like this. There's not five minutes and I start thinking about him. I brush my teeth, I think about him.

"I don't think about the crash or something like that, I think about the guy. I take a shower and when I close my eyes I think about him. There's nothing that will take that from my head. I want to continue thinking about him too."