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2004 United States Grand Prix
In-depth: Minardi

Zsolt Baumgartner may have been the last of the finishers, but that was in eighth place, enough to give Minardi its first point of the season and himself the first Drivers Championship point of his F1 career. He'd been just one place away from getting it in Monaco.

This makes Baumgartner the first Hungarian driver to score in the World Championship, though not by a long chalk the most successful Hungarian driver in Grand Prix racing. There's still some way to go before another of his countrymen matches Ferenc Szisz's French GP win for Renault 98 years ago.

Another historical oddity is that this was Minardi's first points-scoring result since Mark Webber finished fifth in the Australian Grand Prix. Webber now, of course, drives for Jaguar, and Baumgartner's result means that Jaguar is no longer at the bottom of the Manufacturers table - and not likely to be for the rest of the year, either, unless Minardi can benefit several times more from getting at least one car to the finish of races as difficult to complete as this one proved to be.

Team-mate Gianmaria Bruni didn't have anything like the same kind of luck. His Minardi was one of five cars involved in the first-lap shunt sparked off by Christian Klien running into Cristiano da Matta's gearbox, and one of the four which retired as a result of it.

Race Report
2004 F1 World Championship Calendar
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