Mario Andretti looks back at the Indy 500 and also looks at what the future holds for the historic race.
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Jeff Roberson / Associated PressFor nearly 50 years, Mario Andretti has been coming to Indianaplis in May. On Friday, Andretti, right, checks out information on his cell phone with son Michael, center, and grandson Marco, left. Marco will drive in Sunday's Indianapolis 500.Indianapolis -- The mane is thick and flowing gray, his mind is extra sharp at 71 years old and his opinions are direct, as one would expect from racing icon Mario Andretti.
The Indianapolis 500 will celebrate its centennial today at the 2.5-mile Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Andretti has been around Indy since 1965, winning in 1969, and witnessing almost every major change in the sport since then. He was a participant in most.
The Indy Racing League and the Speedway will begin a new chapter next season with an array of new engines and chassis that will mark an end to more than a decade of spec racing and return the sport to its roots. But even with Andretti on board with the changes and excited about racing's future, he chuckles and says the powers-that-be aren't ready for what he'd like to see. So he won't share it.
"I don't want to stir up the pot," he said, smiling and leaning back on the two rear legs of his patio chair. "I think what I'd come up with would be unreasonable for the times. It would definitely cost more money. It would be shut down right away, so I'm not even going to dream. . . . [But] I see good things, because I like the new rules they have come up with."
As futuristic as the next generation Indianapolis 500 car is, Mario Andretti is already looking well beyond that. Only time will tell if it can overshadow what Andretti has driven in the past . . . and driven well.
Andretti, a consultant for the Andretti Autosports team owned by his son, Michael, was named Driver of the Year in three different decades (1967, 1978, 1984). This month, Andretti was named No. 7 on the list of the Top 10 Indy 500 drivers; he is the only one on the list without multiple Indy 500 triumphs.
Andretti was part of the evolution from front-engine roadsters to rear-engine, ground-effects cars; from single-harness seatbelts to five-point harness belts; from an era of chief mechanics to chief engineers; from stick shifts on the floor to paddle shifts on the steering wheel; from gasoline to methanol and more. He raced both by the seat of his pants, and by his fingertips.
"In my span, from decade to decade, there have been some incredible changes," Andretti said, still with the hint of Modeno, Italy, in his voice. "We were on the cusp of all that."
Andretti's name is wrapped in Indianapolis Motor Speedway history. His rookie year he wore an open-face helmet that was little more than a construction hat, in a race where the top qualifying lap speed was 161.233 mph. By the time he retired in 1994 his helmet was comparable to that of an air force fighter ace in a race where the one-lap qualifying speed was now up to 231.604 mph.
He is the only driver to be declared an Indy 500 winner -- in 1981 after Bobby Unser was penalized for passing 11 cars under caution -- only to lose the title four months later when a protest was upheld. Unser was fined $40,000 instead and declared the winner.
Young Andretti won in roadsters in his youth, and in the first generation rear-wing, stick-shift ground effect machines in his prime. He raced with open-faced helmets and before fireproof suits, and ended his career driving computer-aided machines that can tell the pressure of every tire at a glance and the remaining amount of fuel down to the quart, all on a 10-inch steering wheel that also shifts the car into any gear needed.
"When I get into some of these older cars now, even my own, I say 'holy mackerel,' " Andretti said. "But that is all we knew at the time. As drivers, were we wanting more in terms of protection? Yeah. But it took a long time for the sanctioning bodies to realize the importance of safety.
"The reason it was important is because it had to be ruled in. There is no engineer in the world that's going to apply a safety feature to the car, because there is almost always a performance penalty with it. That's why you have to have it mandatory."
And if the conversation turns to the new rule for today's race, double-file restarts, the statesman-spokesman has an opinion on that as well.
"To me, I think the jury is out," he began. "I understand it's for additional excitement, more action. But the negative could be, we could lose cars [to crash]. And when you lose too many cars you lose the integrity of the race. That's my problem. I'm really afraid that could be the case.
"The big concern I have, from midrace on, there's going to be a lot of marbles [small pieces of rubber from tires] out there. At the start of the race, three abreast in the corner, you can make it. But midrace on, with the restart, you won't. I hope and pray none of my concerns come to bear, but I'm also trying to be realistic about it. I have a potential problem with it. I'm not sure this is [prudent]."
Even now, well past his prime, it's Andretti that race fans want to ride with when selected to take a pace car tour around the speedway oval. He's known not to dawdle, giving passengers a stiff-back, white-knuckle experience, all the while explaining the difference between an open-wheel, open-air race missile of today and the closed coupe on the nearby interstate.
And with a new era dawning, Andretti shows no signs of stepping out of the pits.
"I love technology," said Andretti. "I love going forward. Honestly, what kept me motivated all my years, a lot of it, was the fact that we had a like-new car every year. It wasn't always healthy, trying to build the better mousetrap, but I loved that. I think the good thing about this series now is a lot of that is coming back."
Indeed, that is the foundation of the Indianapolis 500: a testing ground for auto builders around the world to bring their machines to Indianapolis for a test of speed, endurance and technology. In 1911 there were more than 24 chassis/engine combinations in the 40-car field. In today's 33-car grid everyone, including pole-sitter Alex Tagliani, will be racing the same Dallara/Honda.
Andretti, the face of the Speedway's past and its future, looks forward to a diversified starting grid next year.
"Next year I think we're going to see three engines," Andretti said. "And the chassis situation, a new chassis. What I'd like to see is like before; a Lola and a March and a Reynard go out there and be within a tenth of one another yet look totally different. I think you are going to see that again out of the new cars."
When Andretti first arrived at Indy in the 1960s, media coverage was booming due to television, the space age was blossoming and sponsorship was becoming a key to success in Indy-car racing. Still, technology and speed had to face safety head on in order for the sport to survive. In 1964, one year before Andretti's Rookie of the Year debut at Indy, Eddie Sachs and Dave MacDonald perished in a crash and fire. In 1973, Swede Savage died after a blazing Indy crash led to a rule change limiting fuel capacity to 40 gallons.
More than crashes, fire was a driver's No. 1 fear in auto racing. Before the fireproof Nomex material drivers wear today, there was no real protection from fire.
"What we had then was different than now," Andretti said. "There was a 55-gallon drum of solvent we had to dip our race suits in, then let them dry. They felt like papier-mache. But it was minimal protection, to be honest with you."
At the speedway, crashes and fires [rpr: where: ]were common into the 1970s.
"I was burned in 1969 during practice," Andretti said of his lone Indy-winning spring. "I was burned all across my nostrils. So I took the spare car and qualified in the middle of the front row. For the front row picture I had my twin brother, Aldo, sit in the car. And nobody questioned it for a long time. That picture is a keepsake now."
Eventually sanctioning bodies began to legislate for safety, and not just speed, while applied technology began offering new protections for drivers.
"With the coming of the space age, that's when the Nomex material became available," Andretti said. "Auto racing latched onto that immediately. But it wasn't until, really, the application of the fuel cell, that fire became somewhat controlled. They were developed for the helicopters used in Vietnam. They were designed to withstand 20mm shells, I believe, to protect the troops from fire. That was huge for auto racing, because we were losing guys that didn't have a broken bone, but were inhaling the fire from their accidents and were dead."
Turbine airplane engines and four-wheel drive arrived at Indy in 1967. The first rear-engine car won at Indy in 1968. By 1972 rear wings and ground effects were the rage, bumping one-lap qualifying speed records from 174.656 mph by A.J. Foyt in 1971 to 196.678 mph by Bobby Unser in 1972. In 1977, Tom Sneva topped the 200-mph barrier, 200.535 mph as the sport was about to witness a melting pot of personalities, politics, technology and drama that makes the Indianapolis 500 great.
"We were one of the first teams to [computer] instrument the car in the mid-'80s," Andretti said. "Quite honestly, that was huge. We really started understanding more and more about the chassis dynamics. Of course that advanced the bar incredibly. The 'a-ha' moment was the mouse, because everything was estimated, up to that point.
"I always used to say, 'If I could just put a little mouse on that suspension and that mouse could tell me what I want to know, I'd love that.' Now we've got a computer mouse to do it. So the computer started telling us all that we wanted to know. And I embraced that. To me, technology is a very interesting part of the sport."
In 1987, Andretti and his high-tech machine at Indy dominated the field in a developmental Chevrolet engine, leading 170 of the first 180 laps. Then ignition failure ended his day. "That was the most disappointing one because I had everybody really covered," Andretti said.
Less than a decade later Andretti retired (1994) and the political wars began where the speedway and the outside governing body of the sport, Championship Auto Racing Teams, split into two racing series (1995). That splintered loyalties, diluted financial support for the teams, and led to fan apathy.
"Because of that they had to cut down, tighten their belts, tighten up the rules and make it a spec series where everybody had the same thing," Andretti said. "A spec series, you take away a lot of the technology aspect."
But with open-wheel racing back under one umbrella and new rules embracing technology, Andretti is excited about the race's future. And that means the love affair Andretti started with Indianapolis when he arrived at The Brickyard for the first time nearly 50 years ago will still be going strong into the future.
