Car Guy Magazine Car Guy Magazine issue 115 | Page 13

But the family’s struggles didn’t end with the cessation of
war hostilities. In 1945, Montona d’Istria was ceded to Yugoslavia and the family lived under dictator Marshall Tito’s Communist fist until 1948 when, like many Italian Istrians, the
family fled, settling in a refugee camp in Lucca, Italy, where
they often subsisted in squalid conditions.
But it was here that Andretti’s racing passions were fired.
In 1954 Mario and Aldo made the trip to Monza for the Italian Grand Prix. There they watched their idol Alberto Ascari-who powered his Ferrari to world championships in 1952
and 1953--battle unsuccessfully with the domineering Argentinean Formula One great Juan Manuel Fangio. Andretti was
riveted by Ascari’s icily relaxed racing style--a man totally in
control of his machine.
“The mold was cast then,” Andretti says.

But a year later, four days after surviving a freak accident at Grand Prix of Monaco when a brake locked entering chicane, pitching Ascari and his Lancia into the
Bay of Hercules, the Italian hero was dead. On a whim Ascari decided to take a few
leisurely laps at the Monza Autodome in a Ferrari driven by young Formula One
racer Eugenio Castellotti. After three laps, he punched the throttle down the long
straight, crashing on the Curva di Vialone, one of the track’s challenging high-speed
corners. Ascari was thrown to his death from the tumbling Ferrari.
That same year, after receiving their emigration papers, the Andretti family
settled in Nazareth, Pennsylvania. It was here that Mario and Aldo set about to
build a 1948 Hudson Hornet Sportsman racing car. The Hudson, their thinking
went, might give them a distinctive edge over most of the Nazareth racers who were
racing ’37 Fords. They built most of the car themselves, employing an unusual
strategy to milk that edge for maximum benefit.
After years of dominating stock car racing in the 1950s, Hudson’s racing team

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