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[edit] Racing career
Andretti's first exposure to auto racing was watching part of the Mille Miglia race in 1954, where he became captivated by Alberto Ascari. [1]
[edit] Stock cars
Mario and Aldo worked on a 1948 Hudson Hornet Sportsman stock car in an uncle's garage in 1959. They took turns racing the car on oval dirt tracks near Nazareth in 1959 in the old Hudson. The twins each had two wins after their first four races. [2] Mario had 20 modified stockcar wins in his first two seasons. [3]
Other major races that he won in that period include his 1967 Daytona 500 win for Holman Moody, [4]
[edit] IndyCars
Mario made his championship car debut in the USAC series in 1964 at Trenton, New Jersey, starting sixteenth and finishing eleventh. Andretti won his first championship car race at the Hoosier Grand Prix in 1965. His third place finish at the 1965 Indianapolis 500 won him the Rookie of the Year award, and won the series championship. He repeated as series champion in 1966.
Andretti finished second in the IndyCars in 1967 and 1968. 1969 was a banner year for Andretti. In IndyCar, he won nine races, the 1969 Indianapolis 500, and the season championship.
He returned to IndyCars full time in 1982. He won the pole for nine of sixteen events in 1984, and claimed his fourth CART title. It was the first series title for car owner Newman/Haas Racing, owned by Carl Haas and actor Paul Newman. His last victory in IndyCar racing came in 1993 at Phoenix International Raceway, the year that his son Michael raced in Formula One. The win made Andretti the oldest recorded winner in an IndyCar event (53 years, 34 days old). [5]
Andretti also made the saying "Mario is slowing down!" famous at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Andretti's futility at Indy is legendary.
Andretti was the first driver to exceed 200 miles per hour while practicing for the 1977 Indianapolis 500. [6]
Andretti finished second in the 1981 Indianapolis 500 by eight seconds behind Bobby Unser. The following day Unser was penalized one lap for passing cars under a caution flag, and Andretti was declared the winner. Unser and his car owner Roger Penske appealed the race stewarts' decision. USAC overturned the one lap penalty four months later, and penalized Unser with a $ 40,000 fine.
In the 1985 Indianapolis 500, he was passed by Danny Sullivan. Sullivan subsequently spun in front of Andretti, pitted on his own caution, and then passed Mario again to go on for the win. Andretti dominated the 1987 Indianapolis 500 testing, led for 170 of the first 177 laps, but was taken out by an electrical failure before the finish on lap 200.
Mario finished all 500 miles just five times, including his 1969 Indianapolis 500 victory. Andretti suffered broken ankles in the 1992 Indianapolis 500 crashing hard in turn four during the race. His last race at Indy was the 1994 Indianapolis 500.
Andretti was performing a tire test for his son Michael's IndyCar on April 24, 2003 in place of the injured Tony Kanaan at Indianapolis At 5:58 pm -- two minutes before the scheduled end of the session -- Andretti powered out of the first turn onto the "south chute" of the circuit. In his path lay a chunk of debris from Kenny Brack's car, which had crashed seconds earlier. The object forced the nose of Andretti's car to become airborne, and Andretti's car went into a rapid double reverse somersault at speeds exceeding 200 miles per hour. Television footage from a local TV station's helicopter showed that the car was nearly high enough to clear the debris fence mounted atop the circuit's outer retaining wall. Andretti's car fell back to earth, having been slowed by its mid-air tumble, and slid to a stop. Luckily, the car landed right side up and Andretti walked away from the crash with very minor injuries.
[edit] Formula One career
At Andretti's first Indianapolis 500, in 1965, he met Colin Chapman, owner of the Lotus Formula One team, who was running eventual winner Jim Clark. Andretti told Chapman of his ambition to compete in Formula One and was told "When you're ready, call me." By 1968 Andretti felt he was ready. Chapman gave him a drive, and the young American took pole position on his debut at the 1968 United States Grand Prix at Watkins Glen.[7]
Andretti drove sporadically in Formula One over the next four years for Lotus, March, and for Ferrari while continuing to focus on his racing career in North America. He won his first grand prix in 1971 on his debut for the Italian team at the South African Grand Prix, and won again at the non-championship Questor Grand Prix in the US three weeks later.[8]
It wasn't until 1975 that Andretti drove a full Formula One season, for the American Parnelli team, new to Formula One, although successful in both Formula 5000 and Championship Car racing in America. The team had run Andretti in the two North American end-of-season races in 1974 with promising results. Despite potential - Andretti qualified fourth and led the tragic 1975 Spanish Grand Prix for nine laps before his suspension failed - he scored only five points. Andretti continued to compete in the States, missing two races to do so.[9]
When the Parnelli team pulled out of Formula One after two races of the 1976 season, Andretti returned to Colin Chapman's Lotus team, for whom he had already driven at the season-opening Brazilian Grand Prix. His ability at developing a racing car soon progressed the Lotus towards the front end of the Formula One grid, culminating in a victory at the season's concluding race at the Mount Fuji circuit in Japan where Mario was a lap ahead of his nearest challenger. In 1977, at Long Beach, he became the only American to win the United States Grand Prix West, in the Lotus 78 "wing car". Andretti's development work at Lotus was to result in the revolutionary "ground effect" Lotus 79 of 1978, a season in which he won six races and took the title — a bitter-sweet victory in the light of the death of his teammate Ronnie Peterson, whom Andretti had grown to regard as a close friend. However, Andretti would find little success after 1978 in Formula One, failing to win another grand prix. He had a difficult year in 1979, as the new Lotus car was not competitive, and the team had to rely on the Lotus 79 which was showing its age. In 1980, he was paired with Italian ace Elio de Angelis, but the team was again unsuccessful.
A season with the unsuccessful Alfa Romeo team in 1981 did little to re-kindle Andretti's Formula One career. Like other drivers of the period he did not like the ground effect cars of the time: "the cars were getting absurd, really crude, with no suspension movement whatever. It was toggle switch driving with no need for any kind of delicacy...it made leaving Formula One a lot easier than it would have been."[10] The next year Andretti raced once for the Williams team, after their driver Carlos Reutemann suddenly quit, before replacing the seriously injured Didier Pironi at Ferrari for the last two races of the year. Suspension failure dropped him out of the last race of the season, but at the Italian Grand Prix at Monza he took the pole position and finished third in the race.[11]
[edit] Sportscars
Andretti raced in numerous different series between 1967 and 1975. [2] He juggled Can-Am, Formula 5000, Formula One, IndyCar, drag racing, sprint cars, and many others. He also won the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb. He moved to the Formula 5000 series in the 1973 and 1974, and finished second in the championship in both seasons. He also competed in USAC's dirt track division in 1974, and won the championship while competing in both series.
Although Andretti never competed over a full season of the World Sportscar Championship, he was a regular competitor at North American rounds from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s. In the early 1970s he mainly competed for Ferrari, with whom he also had a Formula One contract. He won three 12 Hours of Sebring endurance races (1967, 1970, 1972). He also won the 24 Hours of Daytona in 1972. In total he won eight major sportscar events.
Andretti competed at the 24 Hours of Le Mans over four decades. In 1966 and 1967 he drove the same Ford GT40s as the eventual winners, but retired on both occasions, once through an accident and once through an engine problem. Andretti did not return to Le Mans until his full time Formula One career was over in 1982. Over the next 18 years he competed a further seven times, four times with his son Michael. His best results were a third place finish in 1983 and a second place at the 1995 race. He said in a 2006 interview that he feels that the Courage Compétition team "lost [the 1995] race five times over" through poor organization. Andretti's final appearance at Le Mans was at the 2000 race, six years after his retirement from single-seaters, where he drove the Panoz LMP-1 Roadster-S at the age of 60, finishing 16th. [12] A win at Le Mans would have allowed Andretti to match the 'Triple Crown' of victories in the Formula One world championship, Indianapolis 500 and Le Mans 24 hours won by Graham Hill.
