Sports Illustrated - Sports Illustrated - F1 Las Vegas
MADE IN THE USA
A PENNSYLVANIAN BY WAY OF ITALY, 1978 CHAMPION MARIO ANDRETTI IS THE GREATEST OF THE U.S. DRIVERS WHO HAVE SOUGHT TO MAKE THEIR MARK ON THE WORLD STAGE OF FORMULA ONE
AFEW SUMMERS AGO, Mario Andretti took his family to Lake Powell, the impoundment behind Glen Canyon Dam on the Arizona-Utah border, for a week of houseboating, water skiing and just general relaxation. Parnelli Jones, a former rival but then manager of the Indy car team Andretti drove for, was there with his family, too, as were a few other racing people.
Andretti proved as much a daredevil on water skis as he is behind a racing wheel. He loved nothing better than ripping along behind Jones’s Campbell ski boat and seeing how close he could come to the red stone cliffs.
One day, as the group was headed back to the marina, a spectacular thunderstorm cut loose overhead. Lightning bolts clouted the peaks and ridges.
With one hand, Andretti was steering a rented houseboat, “The Quaking Madonna,” as he had named it, and aiming a 35-mm camera with the other hand.
“What are you up to?” someone yelled to him from another boat.
“Trying to shoot the lightning just when it hits,” Andretti answered, not looking away from the viewfinder.
A few moments later, when a great bolt smacked a peak, Andretti’s shutter finger clicked, and he turned with a wide grin.
“I think I got it,” he said.
It was a fitting gesture: If anyone can capture lightning in midair, it’s Mario Andretti.
In September at Monza, Italy, Andretti actually caught the lightning, but he was singed. In his third full season on the Formula One Grand Prix circuit, he clinched the world driving championship, a title he has wanted more than any other in his 21-year racing career. In so doing, he became only the second American ever to win the world’s most-honored racing crown. Phil Hill, who won the title in 1961 while driving for Ferrari, cabled Andretti from Santa Monica, Calif.: dear mario: sincere congratulations on attaining your dream of world champion
after a hard-fought and honorable climb to the title. Dan Gurney, who himself won four Grand Prix races over a 10-year career as one of the most respected drivers on the circuit, wired: well done, champ. if any formula 1 grand prix champion deserves the title world champion, you get my vote and congratulations. it’s from my heart, amico.
But despite all the congratulations, the victory was a painful one for Andretti. His teammate, 34-year-old Ronnie Peterson of Sweden, died after a horrendous 10-car crash on the opening lap of the race. “This is no time to think about celebrating,” Andretti said.
With only three of the season’s 16 Grand Prix races left to run—the one at Monza, the United States GP at Watkins Glen and the Canadian at Montreal after that— Peterson had been the only driver with a mathematical chance of edging Andretti for the title. To some observers, Peterson’s death seemed to taint Andretti’s championship, to make it somehow too easily won. But they were not aware of the contract Peterson had signed early this year when he joined Colin Chapman’s John Player
Team Lotus. “I knew the terms and conditions which I would have to accept when I joined the team,” Peterson had said at Zandvoort, Holland, two weeks before the Italian race, “and part of the deal was that I was No. 2 to Mario. Now he’s in a very good position to take the title, and since I’m the only driver who still has a chance at overtaking him, I won’t do anything to present a threat to his chances.”
That is the way it is in motor racing, but any suggestion that Andretti’s was an easy championship does not take into account the hard facts. Formula One racing is the most demanding test of skill, nerve and judgment in sport. That Peterson was about the 50th person to die at the Monza Autodrome simply underscores the point. Guiding a 1,180-pound open-wheeled race car through traffic on twisting tracks at speeds in excess of 200 mph requires superb reflexes and hairline balance—not to mention complete concentration and total suspension of the imagination. Even the best driver in the world is subject to misjudgments on the part of other drivers, and to mechanical failures that, at such high speeds, can be fatal. To this day no one knows why Jimmy Clark, judged
by some to be the greatest of drivers, crashed to his death negotiating a long sweeping curve while alone in the lead of a Formula Two race at Hockenheim, Germany, in 1968. “Mario is not just a champion,” argues Hill, outraged at any suggestion that it was a cheap success. “He’s a great champion. Mario is a fine, strong, talented driver, a wise driver and a good man.” Hill was struck by the similarities between his championship and Andretti’s. He won it on the same track, Monza, and on the same date, Sept. 10. And his own Ferrari teammate, Wolfgang Graf Berghe von Trips, who died that day at Monza, was Hill’s only rival for the title.
What makes the Formula One title particularly gratifying to Andretti is that only two years ago many people were saying he was washed up. The golden boy of the late ’60s—winner of USAC’s Rookie of the Year award in 1965; points champion in ’65, ’66 and ’69; winner of the Daytona 500 for stock cars; winner of the 12 Hours
“MARIO IS NOT JUST A CHAMPION,” SAID HILL, DISMISSING THOSE
WHO SUGGESTED ANDRETTI’S 1978 TITLE WAS A
CHEAP SUCCESS. “HE’S A GREAT CHAMPION . . . AND A GOOD MAN .”
of Sebring for sports/prototype racers; in fact, winner at all he turned his hand to—seemed now a has-been. He always was near the top in the Indy car point standings, but he hadn’t scored many major victories since 1971, when he took a Ferrari home first in South Africa’s Grand Prix at Kyalami. Such things are not uncommon in motor sports—under the constant strain of travel, cockpit heat, the view from the ragged edge and the deaths of racing friends, a hot young driver, hungry, quick and ambitious, turns overnight into a burnt-out case. Maybe his hands shake in his sleep. Maybe he drinks or chases pit kittens. Maybe he has seen so many crashes that the fire wall between imagination and nerve erodes, and the demons ride his shoulders through every race. Certainly the middle ’70s represented a nadir in Andretti’s career. Was he spooked?
“Nah,” he says, “I just had bum rides.” And he laughs. But of course there is more to it, things that take shape only within the contours of a career.
HE HAS WANTED it from childhood: the world driving title. Mario Gabriele Andretti was born in 1940 in Montona, Italy, a village near Trieste, then part of Italy, the elder (by a few hours) of a set of identical twins. His father, Alvise, was a landowner in that harsh country.
After World War II, Trieste was ceded to Yugoslavia, and the Andrettis lost everything. They spent some time in a displaced-persons’ camp, which may account for Mario’s inability to sit still for very long. Then they moved to Lucca, a city near Florence.
In Lucca, the Andrettis lived across the street from a garage, and the twins, Mario and Aldo, hung out there whenever they could, fascinated with the guts of cars. One year the garagemen took the boys to watch the Mille Miglia pass near Florence. The Mille Miglia was one of the last tough, open-road races. It ran in a great, ragged 1,000-mile circle from Brescia down through the Apennines and back up the coast, over
real roads, flat-out, and anything went. That was until 1957, when the Marquis de Portago, driving a Ferrari with an American friend, Edmund Nelson, blew a tire at high speed not 50 miles from the finish, flew over an embankment and killed himself, Nelson, 11 onlookers and the race as well. But to the young boys from Montona, watching the race in an earlier year, there was nothing more exciting—the crowds, the stink of burned rubber, castor oil and sweat, the great roaring noises ripping past, blurs of color within color. They were hooked.
“In those years, local clubs in Italy were sponsoring a driving program for young drivers,” Andretti recalls. “You had to be 14 to get in it, but Aldo and I lied about our age and started racing at 13. Our folks were dead set against us racing, so we had to do it on the sly. The only one who knew we were racing was the priest, but we had told him in the confessional, so he couldn’t fink on us. We had a motorbike that we shared, and whenever we got banged up in a race—the cars were dinky little things with Fiat Topolino engines, and you couldn’t really get hurt too bad—we’d tell our folks that we’d come off the bike.”
As Andretti speaks, using the argot of the track and contemporary American idioms, there is nevertheless a subtle giveaway that English is his second language. His words come with a staccato rhythm, and he pays careful attention to the enunciation of consonants, so that it seems to the listener that everything he says has been thought out and weighed. It is this trait that leads many people to think that Andretti never lets his guard down. In fact, the opposite is the case.
In 1955, Italy was in an economic nose dive, so the family moved to Nazareth, Pa., where an uncle of Mario’s owned a gas station. While their father went to work in the steel mills, the twins took jobs as pump jockeys with their uncle and saved enough money to buy a ’48 Hudson. In ’58, they again set off racing on the sly, this time on the tiny, tough dirt tracks of eastern Pennsylvania. The boys did well from the start, winning their first couple of races. But then the male fortuna they had successfully evaded in Italy caught up with them in the form of plain old American rotten luck. In his last race of the season Aldo rolled the Hudson and fractured his skull. He was in a coma for nearly a week.
“The truth had to come out, I guess,” Andretti says. “But I hated to be the one to spill it. At first I made up some cock-andbull story about Aldo falling off a truck. But then I had to tell. It was a bad scene. Italian sons do not disobey their fathers, and they sure don’t lie to them. For a long time our father wouldn’t speak to us.”
Aldo raced off and on for 10 more years, but without much luck. In 1969 another accident prompted him to retire. Mario, though, continued nonstop, working his way up through midgets, sprint cars and modifieds, and building a reputation as a hard-charging, win-atall-costs hot-shoe. One day at Hatfield, Pa., on the same track where Aldo had flipped their jalopy, Mario won two midget main events; that night, at Flemington, N.J., he won another midget race. It was Labor Day of ’63, and after that sweep he felt that he was ready for the big time, for the Indy-type “champ cars.” He was 23 years old.
EARLY IN 1964 he got his chance: a ride at Trenton, N.J., for Doug Stearly in a classic Offenhauser roadster, his first championship race on the USAC circuit. He made the field all right, and though he promptly spun out of the race, he went on to finish eighth. “I learned a lesson that day,” he says ruefully, “a lesson about speed and tires and road surfaces. It was a rude awakening.” Later in the season, when Chuck Hulse was injured in a sprint car
race at New Bremen, Ohio, Andretti hit up Hulse’s chief mechanic, Clint Brawner, for an Indy ride in the Dean Van Lines Special that Hulse had been slated to drive. Brawner knew Andretti wasn’t ready for Indy—not quite yet—but he was impressed enough by Andretti’s performance in a sprint car race at Terre Haute to let him finish out the season for Al Dean. Andretti did not let Brawner down. He actually led a couple of races and finished with enough points to end up third in the U.S. Auto Club driver standings for sprint cars that year.
Andretti had started for Brawner and Dean in a traditional front-engined roadster that was little different in concept from the Marmon Wasp in which Ray Harroun won the first Indianapolis 500, in 1911. In ’65, Brawner made the jump to a rear-engined car. He called it a Hawk, and on the first day of qualifying for Indy that May, Andretti proved it could fly.
Starting fourth on the grid that year, Andretti finished third behind Clark and Parnelli Jones, and became Rookie of the Year. He finished the season with 3,110 points to become the first Indy rookie to take the USAC driving championship since Johnnie Parsons did it in 1949.
He won the pole at Indy the following year, and though he dropped out of the race on the 18th lap with engine trouble, he collected enough points in later races—winning eight of the 15—to take the points championship a second time. He won his third in 1969.
Dean died in 1967, and Andretti was rich enough by then to buy his whole outfit, lock, stock and supercharger. That also was the year that Andretti began to diversify and beat the NASCAR stars at their own game. Driving a Ford Fairlane prepared by the lightly disguised Ford factory team of Holman-Moody, he won the Daytona 500, stock car racing’s biggest event.
Andretti was becoming known all right, by style as well as by name. And while he was unfailingly deferential to reporters, sponsors and sponsors’ pals, he could be demanding when it came to his car. Andretti wanted his Ford to be set up “loose” at Daytona so that he could go deep into the corners and allow the rear of the car to break away. It’s a driving technique that requires split-second timing and unceasing concentration. That’s why most of the NASCAR drivers do not use it regularly. It is tiring enough to contend with the g-forces that come with racing at 180 mph on a high-banked track for 200 laps without asking that a driver delicately flip a car’s rear out in every turn as well. But by setting up his Ford in such a way, Andretti also did one other thing in the corners—he used up a lot of track, making passing more difficult. In less talented hands a “loose” car at Daytona would have been an ambitious folly. For Andretti it was a winner.
The next year, Andretti qualified fourth at Indy but blew his engine after two laps and finished badly in some other races, though he placed second in the national championship standings. The big bucks—and especially the hot, new four-wheel-drive Lotus-Fords fresh from Colin Chapman’s Lotus shop in England—that Andy Granatelli offered Andretti to become a member of the STP team for the ’69 season were too tempting to turn down. Andretti did not refuse.
Three days before qualifying, Andretti shed the right rear wheel of his Lotus in practice and smacked the outside wall in Turn Four at 150 mph. The body work flew clear, and the car burst into flames. Andretti bailed out with second-degree burns on his face.