He is a 5-foot-4-inch sprite, all of 130 pounds after a plate of spaghetti and a loaf of bread, so diminutive he must run around in the shower merely to get wet.
This is why that ad campaign was a work of genius that tickled the imagination. It featured him standing in a fire suit with his car in the background, staring into the camera, pointing at his audience, growling like some television wrestling thug and boldly declaring in his Brazilian accent, “I keeek . . . !”
Cristiano da Matta was tied to that phrase as soon as that commercial started running on TV, and fans would scream it as soon as they spotted him at the racetrack.
“I heard a lot of that that weekend in Chicago,” he says of his trip here for last year’s Target Grand Prix that has its third running Sunday at Chicago Motor Speedway.
After he won that race, he only heard it more. It was the first victory of his CART career, and when he exited his car, the crowd was showering him with those words.
“They wanted me to say it,” he remembers with a smile, and here he couldn’t help but oblige them. So he turned toward them and mimed his thuggish pose and, fists clenched, yelled it again and again.
“That was fun,” he recalls, his smile still in place. “It was funny.”
Da Matta grabbed that victory while driving for PPI Motorsports, but he will defend his title in Sunday’s race running for the Lincolnshire-based Newman/Haas Racing team. It picked him up at last year’s end to replace Michael Andretti, who moved to Team Motorola, and already he has proven himself an able successor.
In his Newman/Haas debut, he won this season’s opener over the road course of Monterrey, Mexico, and in the next race he finished second over the street course of Long Beach. That thrust him to the top of CART’s championship race. Though a pair of crashes then doomed him to a pair of 25th-place finishes, he is still fifth in that race, only 17 points out of first.
Such success is not unfamiliar to the 27-year-old da Matta, whose father Antonio won 14 Brazilian championships in a racing career that spanned 30 years.
The son was exposed to the sport early, yet the father well knew its unpredictable nature and so discouraged the boy from following in his footsteps. He enrolled him in gymnastics classes, pushed him to take up swimming and, when the boy was 14, offered to buy him a very expensive dirt bike.
“You can run it anywhere you want,” the father said. “I can join you, we can go out, go through some trails, we can start practicing together.”
Cristiano said no immediately.
“I knew if I got on that bike, that was going to divert my attention out of motor racing for maybe one or two years because it’s a very interesting sport too,” he explains. “He knew it was something I really enjoyed. So maybe when I turn my mind to racing again, maybe it’s too late. So I told him right away, `I prefer to have a Go Kart.'”
Da Matta was 16 before his father could give him a Go Kart that was good enough to win races. But when he finally got it, he went out and won his first race. That was his start, and now he could not be stopped, not even by his father’s caution or outsized reputation. His dad was a national hero, but the prospect of constant comparisons did nothing to deter the son, who from the beginning chose blithely to ignore them.
“I wasn’t really worried about what people were going to think of me,” he says. “I just wanted to go out and do what I wanted and have fun. Yes. It’s a hard sport. Even being as successful as he was, my dad said he had more bad moments than good moments. So when a guy like that says something like that, you think, `Wow, that must be a frustrating sport.’ But every sport at the top level is like this, so you just have to have a strong mind-set.”
Does he ever wish he had listened to his dad and pursued another vocation?
“Some days you think back, when everything’s going wrong, you think, `Yeah, maybe if I was at home it would be better.’ But that goes by very fast. Because then you think, `Yeah, at home doing what?’ Probably playing some racing video game or watching racing on TV. So you just calm down and go fix what was wrong.”
Everything went right for da Matta early in his career, and from 1990 through 1994, he was champion of whatever series he graced. Then he spent two years running in Europe and two more running Indy Lights, and then, after winning the Indy Lights’ championship in 1998, he jumped to CART with Arciero-Wells Racing.
That was a developmental team with little chance of winning, yet he remained with it into 2000 when it changed its name to PPI. It was underfinanced, a mere David to Goliaths such as Penske, Ganassi and Newman/Haas, yet slowly da Matta flashed his skills with improved finishes. In Cleveland in early July, he took third even after a first-lap crash dropped him to last, and two weeks later in Toronto, he led 72 laps before finishing fourth. After running in the top five the next week in Michigan, a pit incident doomed him to 17th, but still he came to Chicago filled with confidence.
“I could see I was getting closer,” he remembers, but early in last year’s race here, he went to make a pass, got his wheels in the dirt and was passed quickly by Tony Kanaan and Gil de Ferran.
“I was very mad about that mistake. Very mad,” da Matta says, and that anger remained with him as the race unfolded.
It enveloped him, and it was still there after he came out of a pit stop with the lead and only 51 laps remaining.
“Now no one’s going to pass me unless they run over me,” he thought then.
“I wasn’t going to allow anybody to pass me, not a chance,” he says now. “The only thing that was strange about that race is that I was angry inside the car all the time. I was mad first because my car wasn’t handling the way I wanted it to be handling. But mostly it was that mistake. Even after I crossed the start-finish line, I was still mad. And then, I’m coming into the pits, I felt, `Well, OK, good, I won it.’ But I was still mad. Then suddenly I’m going into pit lane and I saw my whole team celebrating when I was about to park the car. Then I realized, then I thought, `Wow, I just won the race. What am I angry for? I should be happy.’ It was a very strange day for me.”
But it was also the day that confirmed his skills, that stamped him as something more than a cute little commercial-maker. So when Andretti and Newman/Haas parted company, he was the obvious choice to succeed him.
But then another promotional campaign was needed and after his season-opening victory in Mexico, a concept was hatched when his pit crew started screaming, “Da Bears! Da Bulls! Da Matta!!!”
“What’s the deal with all the animals?” he asked a friend there.
He never had seen a football game, never had seen a basketball game, never had seen that “Saturday Night Live” skit about quintessential Chicago sports fans. Here, quickly, this all was explained to him and there were visions of him encoring their performances on film and of T-shirts decorated with his picture and those words.
Those ideas would remain just that. There was concern over copyrights and royalties. But the bit would get taped for use in race promotions, and so there was da Matta once more staring into a camera, this time declaring in his best Brazilian accent, “Da Bears! Da Bulls! Da Matta!!!”
“That was fun,” Chicago’s defending champ says of his other career. “But not as much fun as the other one. That one was really fun.”
