Fittipaldi triumphs in Elkhart carnage

Fittipaldi beat his Newman Haas team-mate Michael Andretti by 1.060 seconds. Finishing behind them weremmates were Adrian Fernandez, Greg Moore and Max Papis.

It is no longer unusual for a road course race to start with a bang, and Road America today's provided one when four cars went off at the first turn and brought the race to a halt for more than 30 minutes.

Helio Castro-Neves was unable to negotiate the turn and drove off the track collecting Max Papis and MemoGidley in the process. Scott Pruett made it a foursome as he spun off trying to avoid them.

A few seconds later, Cristiano da Matta ran off course and Mauricio Gugelmin followed him right into the gravel trap.

The stop allowed the drivers involved in the mishaps to go to their back up cars and when the race restarted Juan Montoya got away from pole winner Michael Andretti.

He led without any significant challenge through the first set of pitstops, the Target team putting him on track in good order.

Behind Montoya the action was at the front of the pack with the Andretti, Fittipaldi and Adrian Fernandez battling for position, often passing each other.

Through the second round of pit stops Montoya briefly lost the lead to Moore who hadn't stopped, but the lead was back with the rookie as soon as Moore pitted and it looked as though he might win his fifth race of the season. However, Lap 49 his transmission gave up and he was out.

Fittipaldi, who was running second, inherited the lead. After the race he admitted, 'I didn't think we could match him unless he had problems.

After he broke I knew all I had to do was bring my toy home and not make any mistakes in the last couple of laps.

'I have been waiting for this day for quite some time,' said an overjoyed Fittipaldi.

'This is even sweeter because in 1996 I had a nice race herewith Michael before my car stopped four laps from the end. But that's racing. Sometimes you need a little bit of luck!'

Andretti tried to get past his team-mate but he just didn't have enough. He made a strategic decision not to take on tyres at the last stop.

He explained, 'We figured that the only way I was going to get by Christian was to try something different. So we thought we would try to get him when he was on cold tyres and I was on warm tyres but then as we were coming out of the pits Greg [Moore] got between the two of us and that basically blew it all.'

Montoya still leads the championship points battle but now leads by 18 points over Michael Andretti.

Gil de Ferran is third, and Fittipaldi's win moves him into fifth spot.

(Results in CART Reports/Results section)