America’s greatest racing driver? It’s subjective and depends entirely on your perspective.
But what we can state for certain is, in terms of worldwide fame, stature, personality, longevity of career and relentless achievement, they don’t come much bigger than Mario Andretti. Just that name alone… he’s a sporting colossus.
Andretti won in pretty much everything he drove across four decades, from the mid-west dirt tracks of the early 1960s on to Indycar, Formula 1, sports cars, Formula 5000, Nascar… even Pikes Peak, which he won in 1969.
The headline achievements require a deep breath: F1 world champion in 1978 in harness with 12 grand prix victories; Indianapolis 500 winner in 1969; four Indycar titles; a Silver Crown dirt oval title in 1974; Daytona 500 winner in 1967 (where he also won the Florida track’s big sports car race in 1972); three Sebring 12 Hours wins; and on and on. The Le Mans 24 Hours? He’s missing an overall victory, but his second place in 1995 (aged 55) was a class win – so he absolutely counts that.
We call such drivers who raced across all motorsport codes ‘all-rounders’ – and Andretti is up there with Stirling Moss among the very best. He just couldn’t get enough. Today, he remains devoted to his beloved sport, through his son Michael’s racing empire and as an enthusiastic ambassador for the new Cadillac F1 team. He’s 85 but doesn’t look or act like it. He’s also an interviewer’s dream – but where do you start? Let’s cover some ground by quizzing him on a few of his favourite things.
Favourite F1 Car: Lotus 78 (1977-78)
Andretti scored a sensational pole position on his F1 debut for Lotus at Watkins Glen in 1968 and scored his first GP win in 1971 for Ferrari in South Africa. But it wasn’t until the mid-1970s, when he fully committed to Lotus, that he gave F1 a proper crack. No wonder he picks the Lotus 78, the first full ground-effect F1 car.
“I think 1977 would have been an easier championship than 1978, but we had some reliability issues, a lot of them with the engine,” says Andretti. He scored four wins and seven pole positions but still finished behind Ferrari champion Niki Lauda and Jody Scheckter’s new Wolf that year. “Also I ran out of fuel while leading [in Sweden], and lost the Canadian GP when the engine blew [just two laps from the finish],” he says.
The following year, Andretti won six times as he and team-mate Ronnie Peterson dominated and the ground-effect aerodynamic revolution really took a grip. “The Lotus 79 was obviously an improvement to some degree, but I was very impressed by the way the 78 responded to my treatment,” he says to explain his choice. “It was a very sincere car.”
Favourite Rival: AJ Foyt
‘Favourite’ is probably the wrong word… These two American sporting icons never got along as they raced through the decades. In fact, at times they hated each other. Andretti struggles when it comes to his rivals. “I raced against so many great drivers. Sometimes I try not to get involved in such conversations in case I leave a key individual out,” he says. But he namechecks Dan Gurney, Jackie Stewart, Al Unser Sr, James Hunt, Niki Lauda, Carlos Reutemann and Patrick Depailler before turning inevitably to AJ Foyt.
“When I broke into Indycars, who was I looking at? AJ. He was my senior, a reigning national champion, and he was the one I felt I had to measure up to. It was not always easy between us,” he says, chuckling. “But I always understood his bark was much worse than his bite. Here’s the thing I always respected: as much as he seemed threatening as a personality, you might think out on the track he might do something stupid, but no. He knew better and you could race wheel to wheel with him. He wouldn’t give an inch, but he was always correct.”
Today, hell has frozen over… “Some years back, my publicist said: ‘Why don’t we wish AJ a happy birthday on Twitter?'” recalls Andretti with a big grin. “So we wrote: ‘Happy birthday to my badass BFF AJ Foyt!’ He didn’t know what BFF meant, so he asked his son Larry. ‘Best friend forever’… What he said in response I can’t repeat!”
Favourite Oval Circuit: The Milwaukee Mile
“You know why?” says Andretti. “Because it was bumpy and had multiple grooves [racing lines] for overtaking. It was almost flat, no banking. There was just something about that place, that you could overtake, you could find a way. I always liked a bumpy track, because in my own mind I thought: ‘Not everybody can deal with this.’ Anyone can deal with a smooth track. When they repaved them, I always thought: ‘Bollocks!’ I had good fortune at Milwaukee, and so did my son Michael.”
Favourite Team Owners: Colin Chapman, Carl Haas and Paul Newman
“No question, in F1 it had to be [Lotus’s] Colin [Chapman]. We worked together. It wasn’t that he was just standing by; he was my race engineer, and that relationship was just beautiful. Somehow we didn’t have to say a lot; we knew what we needed. Those relationships don’t come along casually.”
“In Indycar, when I came back from F1, a lot of people said my career was over, but I won another championship [in 1984] and 18 more Indycar races with Carl Haas and Paul Newman. It’s important to have input. I felt I was entrenched in that team, that my suggestions meant something. Paul’s love of racing was more than what you think: he really loved it. On an amateur level, he raced himself and won SCCA championships. He had the inner feel for it and truly wanted to be a part of the sport. You could sense the way he would react with the mechanics. He would have a beer with them. He was all in.”
Favourite Indycar: Brawner Hawk (1965-69)
Having cut his teeth on dirt ovals and in midgets and modified stock cars, Andretti burst on to the US single-seater scene in 1965: third in the Indy 500 behind Jimmy Clark and Parnelli Jones and the national title all in his rookie season. Two more crowns followed in 1966 and 1969, and in the latter year he also won the 500. Somehow he never did again, as the infamous ‘Andretti curse’ kicked in at The Brickyard.
“The Hawk was a Brabham copy, and it was so easy to stay in the set-up sweet spot,” says Andretti. “In my rookie year it brought me a championship, and I had pole at Indy in 1966 and 1967. In terms of longevity of that car being competitive, with just some tweaks year to year, that’s the one that gave me the most satisfaction.”
Favourite Sports Car: Ferrari 312 PB (1971-72)
Andretti is a naturalised American: he was born and raised in Italy, migrating to the US with his parents and twin brother Aldo as a displaced refugee in 1955, when he was 15, by which time the racing bug had already well and truly bit. “As a young lad still living in Italy and Ferrari being so prominent, my idol was Alberto Ascari, Italy’s [F1] world champion,” he says.
“So it was huge for me to race for Ferrari. Being able to deal directly with Mr Ferrari, Il Commendatore, was quite the privilege. Right down to my very last F1 races, which happened to be with Ferrari (at the end of 1982), substituting for poor Didier Pironi [who suffered terrible leg injuries in a practice crash at Hockenheim] and having some degree of success at Monza [where he took pole position]. My memories of Ferrari are precious.”
Beyond the Kyalami F1 win, Andretti’s most notable successes were in Ferrari sports cars in the early 1970s. He landed four big wins in 1972 at the Daytona 6 Hours and Sebring 12 Hours and at Brands Hatch and Watkins Glen. That year, the 312 PB scored 12 wins from 12 races. “The agility of that car… I enjoyed it tremendously with my team-mate at most of the races, Jacky Ickx,” he says. “There was a reason why we won so much.”
Favourite Road Courses: Road America and Zolder
“In the States, I loved Road America – the elevation changes, the variety of corners. In Europe, I wish I’d had the opportunity to race at Spa,” says Andretti. He missed his best chance in 1972, when Ferrari team-mates Brian Redman and Arturo Merzario won the Spa 1000km. F1 had abandoned the fearsome 8.7-mile track after 1970 over safety concerns and returned to the new, shorter version only in 1983, by which time Andretti had finished with grand prix racing.
Surprisingly, he picks the Belgian GP’s alternative 1970s venue as his favourite European track – even if Zolder was for most underwhelming. “Somehow I had a good feel for that place,” he says. “I qualified with some margins there.” Indeed: he took pole by a gaping 1.5sec in the Lotus 78 in 1977, only to crash out with John Watson in the race. Fastest again a year later, he demolished his opposition, this time in ‘Black Beauty’, the brand-new Lotus 79.
Standout Race: 1987 Indianapolis 500
So many to choose from and he picks one he didn’t win. Famously and painfully. “There are days when you have everything under control, and the Indy 500 in 1987 is an example,” says Andretti. “I dominated that race and had a lap-and-a-half lead on Al Unser Sr. Then, with 23 laps to go, I dropped a valve. It wasn’t because I was taking too much out of the engine; I was running in a bad harmonic because I was running with less revs. I kept them down to look after the engine and it took me out of the race.”
The 1987 Lola T87/00 is a contender for his favourite Indycar. “I had Adrian Newey as my engineer,” he says. “That could have been the most fabulous season, but we had reliability problems. We chose to go with the Ilmor-Chevy one season too early. I loved the power delivery of that engine and working with [Ilmor co-founder] Mario Illien, but the reliability wasn’t there. It’s another car in which I felt so comfortable and confident. It’s very seldom that you feel like: ‘Today, they have to beat me – and if I don’t make a mistake, there’s no way they can.’ It’s amazing that’s a statement you can make only once in 50 years!”
Favourite Street Circuit: Long Beach
“In F1, I enjoyed Monaco but never had much luck there for some reason,” says Andretti. The opposite was true at the Long Beach Grand Prix in California. Andretti won during the race’s F1 era in 1977 – a thriller versus Jody Scheckter and Niki Lauda – then scooped a Long Beach hat-trick (1984, 1985 and 1987) when it became an Indycar race.
“F1 lost something when Long Beach switched to Indycar,” he says. “The fanbase it used to attract… in terms of attendance, it’s still only second to the Indianapolis 500. There’s something very appealing about that area, and the city itself has really grown nicely.”
Motorsport Today: Andretti’s belief in Cadillac
Politics put paid to Michael Andretti’s attempt to lead his organisation into F1. Nevertheless, his father is still a public face for the Cadillac team joining the grid next year – a no-brainer for the GM brand. Who better to represent a bold American F1 team to the wider world? Mario Andretti’s final Indycar season (as team-mate to Nigel Mansell at Newman-Haas) was 31 years ago, yet he remains fully plugged into motorsport, because he’s still in love with racing. “It’s the same as it has always been,” he says. “Technology evolves, obviously, but the human element is always the same. Yesterday’s champions would be champions today and vice versa, no question.”
Before Lotus in the mid-1970s, Andretti spent a fruitless season and a bit trying to crack F1 with the Vel’s Parnelli team, run by his old rival Parnelli Jones. He knows from painful first-hand experience how difficult F1 can be, especially from a standing start. “It’s an enormous challenge, but everyone realises that. We’re not going in there blind,” he says of the Cadillac team, which will operate from a base at Silverstone. “Team principal Graeme Lowdon has done a phenomenal job of hiring the right people. We have a lot of experience in the team, people who have been there and done that.
It’s a new team, but trust me: there’s a lot of people who have done it all. Hopefully, everyone has got the same fresh rulebook to look at and we will be somewhere in the mix. We have no illusions, but we do have expectations of ourselves, to make ourselves proud and go from there. We are being realistic.”
Michael Andretti tried to crack F1 as a driver but, with Ayrton Senna as his team-mate, didn’t see out his lone season at McLaren in 1993. Mario is one of only two American F1 champions, the other being Phil Hill, who won for Ferrari in 1961. It has been slim pickings for US drivers since his own Lotus heyday. But now there’s a new contender. Colton Herta has quit the Andretti Indycar team to make a bid for F1. He’s only Cadillac’s reserve driver and, at 25, plans to pitch for a race seat by proving himself in Formula 2. It’s a huge task, but Mario is fully behind him.
“Do exactly what he’s doing,” says Andretti when asked what advice he would offer Herta. “That-a-boy. At one point, you have to make a decision. I dabbled in F1 early on, started in 1968 but didn’t really commit myself until 1975, when it was now or never. He’s a lot younger than I was and he’s doing it out of sheer passion, which is something I respect tremendously.
I always thought he would be a candidate as an American driver over there, and what I like is that every race he won in Indycar… was down to pure speed. That’s huge.” In Mario Andretti, Herta has the perfect mentor to draw from when the going gets tough – which it surely will. Andretti has seen it all, largely because he has done it all too.