Andretti finds success at Indy as owner
INDIANAPOLIS – The Andretti clan has a favorite saying about the Indianapolis Motor Speedway: This place picks the winner.
A driver and a team can do everything right and leave the Indianapolis 500 with heartbreak. Or circumstances can turn a good day into a great one.
An Andretti first drove at Indy in 1965. Five drivers from three generations have competed a total of 72 times. This place has picked only Mario, and just once, 49 years ago.
Michael, his eldest son, tried 16 times. He dominated and broke down. He lost in a shootout. He led lap after lap after lap, only to see someone else picked.
Yet now – as if to prove the family’s point in his retirement – Andretti’s team has become the most consistently successful team to race in the 500.
In Sunday’s 102nd running, six drivers will vie to deliver Andretti his third consecutive title, his fourth in five years and his sixth title in 14 tries.
“You can’t explain anything at this place,” says Andretti, equally bewildered and satisfied.
As a team owner, he can offer his drivers nothing tangible he didn’t also have when he slipped on his fire suit and helmet. Good cars. Strong engines. Smart engineers. Talented mechanics. And yet …
“All those races, we’ve had not just one car capable of winning,” he says of the victories. “We’ve had quite a few, and we were always lucky because of the numbers to always have one running at the end that didn’t have problems.”
So maybe math plays a role. Andretti was one against 32 in the cockpit and will be six against 27 Sunday from pit road.
But look at the math from his driving career.
Andretti led 431 laps, 11th most on the all-time list. More than Rick Mears – who edged him in 1991 to become a four-time winner – and more than four of the six men who’ve won three times. His 160 laps led in 1992 – before a broken fuel pump knocked him out – were the eighth most by anyone in a single race. He finished among the top 10 in nine of his starts; no other non-winner has done that more.
“I haven’t really learned anything from not winning,” says Andretti, 55 and retired since the end of the 2007 race. “But I think I’ve learned how to be competitive here. Because I’ve always been competitive here as a driver. There’s things like that I think I can bring to the party.
“But not winning as a driver, I don’t think there’s anything I really brought except for if guys come complaining about anything, I’m like, ‘All right. Look at my record. I don’t want to hear about how you’ve had bad luck here. No worse than me. So go away.’ ” Andretti chuckles.
The laughs come more easily when you’ve won five of these things than when you come every month and try to explain why you haven’t won any.
Andretti was a partner in Andretti Green Racing in 2005, when Dan Wheldon came on at the end, and he was a co-owner/teammate – finishing 13th – when Dario Franchitti won a rain-shortened race in ’07.
Ryan Hunter-Reay took the first under the Andretti Autosport banner in 2014, edging Helio Castroneves. Rookie Alexander Rossi stole the 100th on fuel mileage, but if he had run out, Carlos Muñoz was there in second place. And last year, Takuma Sato held off Castroneves.
“Never in a million years do you get tired of that,” Andretti says. He wants to beat Roger Penske’s victory record, which sits at 16. ”We’ve got to get going here.
“What’s been really cool is we’ve done it with five different drivers. … It’s always the first time. Last year, it being with the first Japanese driver. The year before, a rookie coming in and doing it. … Every one was different.”
Muñoz credits the team’s attention to detail.
“That’s why I think if you’re doing a one-off, Andretti is the best team to do only the one-off,” says Muñoz, who signed with the team for just the 500 this year. “You know, my car, they start preparing in February. … So you know it’s going to be a good car.”
Sato, a Formula One veteran, points to the team’s technical savvy.
“Andretti Autosport is such a sophisticated engineering group with the resources they have try to equalize every five cars, sometimes six cars, and they did really quite a good job,” says Sato, who moved to Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing in the off-season.
A worldwide organization, Andretti Autosport is able to borrow talented people from its Indy Lights, American Rallycross, Formula E and even Australian V8 Supercars teams to staff six entries.
Hunter-Reay looks at the way Andretti attacks practice and the drivers and crews work together as a strength.
“The preparation is one side of it,” Hunter-Reay says, “and then what we make of our setup to gain maximum potential grip in race trim is the other side of it.”
And then, yes, luck and timing both do play a part. The winning drivers in each of Andretti’s five Indy victories combined to lead a total of 151 laps, barely one-third as many as their leader did at the track.
“There’s just so many elements over the course of 500 miles,” says Marco Andretti, Michael’s 31-year-old son. He is 0 for 12, the runner-up as a rookie and third-place finisher three times.
“It’s not just the driving, not just the pace, not just the pit stops, the strategy, it’s all of the above. Need to tick all those boxes and see what we can do.”
Then maybe, just maybe, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway will pick a car driven by an Andretti again.