Car Guy Magazine Car Guy Magazine issue 115 | Page 11

There’s a famous quote about speed that will forever be tied to Mario Andretti.
Bring up his name, and his quote is sure to follow: “If everything seems under
control, you’re not going fast enough.”
To Andretti, that’s racing in a nutshell. It distills his belief that triumph is
milked from the edges of chaos. Yet it’s not necessarily brute speed to which Andretti is referring, the kind unleashed by a relentless right foot.
For Andretti, comfort is the enemy of victory. If you’re not hyperventilating at
the end of a qualifying run, if you’re not straining under the mental and physical pressures of pushing a racecar on the slithering edge of havoc, you’re not going fast enough.
“When you are on top of everything, when you are at the limit, you exert everything,” he says. “If you’re under the limit, it means you’re giving something away;
you’re leaving something on the table.”
It is from such mettle that Andretti wrought one of the most storied and remarkable careers in motorsports. His knack for taking a bad car and bending it to
his will earned him 111 victories over five decades in virtually every form of racing.
He took the checkered flag at the Indianapolis 500 and the Daytona 500. He captured the Pikes Peak Hill Climb and was victorious three times at Sebring. He won
the inaugural Japanese Grand Prix in 1976 in a torrential downpour and took the
Formula One World Championship two years later, joining Phil Hill as the only
American to ever capture the title. Andretti racked up four Champ Car National
Championships, becoming the first driver in racing history to win both Formula
One and Champ Car titles.
But his triumphs don’t rest solely on championships. Andretti was the first driver
to punch the 200 mile-per-hour barrier at Indianapolis during a practice run in 1977.
In 1993 he set the world closed course speed record on a bumpy Michigan International Speedway, powering around the track at 234.275 mph while exceeding speeds
of 250 mph down the straightaway, earning him the pole for the Michigan 500. He
set this record at the age of fifty-three and it stood intact until 1996, when Jimmy
Vasser clipped it with a speed of 234.665 a year after the track was repaved.
And Andretti was as savvy on dirt as he was on pavement. In 1974, he captured
the USAC National Dirt Track Championship title, becoming one of the only drivers
in the history of motor sports to successfully command sports cars, sprint cars, midgets,
top-level open wheel racers and stock cars on ovals, road courses, drag strips and dirt
tracks. Thus, in 2000, the Associated Press named Andretti “Driver of the Century.”
“Mario is no wallflower, but a tough hombre: extremely talented, with a blinding passion and fierce determination, laced with a great deal of idealism and romanticism,” wrote racing legend Dan Gurney in the book Mario Andretti, a Driving
Passion (Gordon Kirby). “His resilience and sustained passion for driving competitively are breathtaking. Top this off with a business acumen worthy of the toughest
Wall Street barons…and you have a sense of Mario’s character.”
That Wall Street baron’s acumen was unleashed in full after Andretti retired
from racing in 1994, capping nearly four decades behind the wheel. He deploys
it in his car dealerships. He dials it in on Peninsula Petroleum, a fuel supplier that
operates more than thirty gas stations on the West Coast and under whose umbrella
Andretti hints he harbors bold plans to build an oil refinery. He uses it to keep the

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