Car Guy Magazine Car Guy Magazine issue 115 | Page 14

RIGHT South African Grand Prix, 1980.
LEFT Battling Nikki Lauda for the lead
at the Dutch Grand Prix of 1977.
BELOW RIGHT 1980 Canadian Grand Prix.
was folding after Marshall Teague, the team’s primary driver, was killed. Teague
died while attempting a closed course speed record in a reconfigured Indy car at the
newly opened Daytona International Speedway on February 11, 1959 – eleven days
before the first Daytona 500. The brothers hit upon the idea of purchasing set-up
information from the dissolving Hudson racing team – information they used to
fine-tune their Hornet.
“We couldn’t afford to buy assets but we could buy chassis and suspension
information and figure out how to set these cars up so that we can get the most
out of them,” Andretti says. “It gave us our very first victory in our very first race.”
Mario and Aldo each won their first races. The edge paid off.

Driven by Passion
Those early Nazareth dirt track victories cast the die. From there, Andretti earned
success in stock cars through 1959 and 1960. Between 1960 and 1961 he captured
twenty-one sportsman stockcar victories in forty-six races before moving on to midgets and sprints. It was through the turbulent 1960s, when Andretti was often underestimated as a driver and was forced to wrestle sub-par equipment, when he matured
into a champion. The 1960s was also a terrible decade for drivers in virtually all
forms of racing. It was a time when the sport’s cruel realities intruded with severity;
an era when scant attention was paid to safety. Equipment such as effective roll bars
and cages, fuel cells, fire suits and racing harnesses were almost nonexistent.
“The safety was never really dealt with rigorously in any way,” Andretti insists.
“I remember how uncool it was to even ask for a pad here and there in the cockpit.

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They’d look at you like ‘God. What a sissy.’” Andretti remembers attending drivers meetings at the beginning of the racing season wondering who would be left after the last race. “We used to lose five,
six guys,” he says. “I mean, the sprint cars in ’66, we lost four guys
in two races.”
Along with drivers such as famed Formula One driver Jackie
Stewart, Andretti was at the forefront pushing for driver safety. He
wondered: Why couldn’t the same innovation and technical prowess
devoted to speed and handling be applied to safety? Not that the
answer wasn’t brutally clear. Virtually every safety measure exacted
a performance penalty, thus wholesale adoption of safety standards
met with stiff resistance. Andretti quickly realized safety had to be
mandated. The steadily expanding commercialization of the sport
and the broadcasting of its events over the television airwaves forced
the issue. Its sanctioning bodies came to the realization that racing
would not survive unless safety became paramount.
“You will never have companies spend millions and millions
of dollars to be associated with the sport only to attend funerals,”
Andretti says. “They want to celebrate.”
But for Andretti, danger and tragedy were often the rude intruders of celebration. In 1978, the year he captured the Formula
One World Championship, his teammate and close friend Ronnie
Peterson sustained fatal injuries on the opening lap of the Italian