INDIANAPOLIS 500 : Indy Racing’s Saddest Sight

INDIANAPOLIS —  Mario Andretti is the greatest name in Indianapolis 500 history, period. He won the thing five or six times, right?

Well, no. He actually won the thing twice.

Well, come to think of it, if you look in the record book, you’ll be told he won it only once.

Don’t believe everything you read. In 1981, you’ll see Bobby Unser listed as the winner. He’s on the Borg-Warner Trophy. But actually, he won it in court six months after the event. The circumstances are complicated, but the essentials are these: Unser was fined $40,000 instead of being penalized a lap for a major race infraction. “I would pay $40,000 every year for an Indy victory,” was Andretti’s one bitter comment.

When I tell you that, I have told you almost all you need to know about Mario Andretti at Indianapolis. For him, it hasn’t been a race, it’s been a hoodoo. “Andretti is slowing down!” has been the saddest sound the Speedway has heard year after year as Mario would lead the race into the final stages, sometimes in sight of the checkered flag, only to have his engine start to cough. Mario Andretti led this race more laps--556--than all but two--Al Unser and Ralph DePalma--of the 500 or so drivers who have raced here.

You would think he would take out an insurance policy against even having to fly over this place, but when Mario Andretti rides his 29th and final race over this course in today’s 78th Indy 500, there won’t be a dry eye in the house--including Mario’s.

The name Andretti means to auto racing what Cobb and Ruth meant to baseball or Grange to football. Or Rockefeller to oil.

Actually, it would be more to the point to say he means to his sport what Sam Snead means to golf. It’s almost the same story of undeserved misfortune. Except Snead never won his sport’s glitziest ornament--the U.S. Open. Mario did win one in his sport. He should have won 10. He was the fastest qualifier four times. He was on the pole three of them. He finished second at a great saving of life one year, 1985, when he came in 2/100ths of a second behind Danny Sullivan after saving Sullivan’s lead--and/or life--by spinning out of his way after Danny did a 360 out-of-control spin of his own.

No more dashing, romantic figure ever climbed into a race car. No athlete ever got more out of it. For 7,567 miles, he has tooled a race car around this racetrack on Memorial Day weekend. And that’s only a fraction of the miles he has actually driven here.

Indy auto racing before Andretti was a kind of lube-rack, oil-change sport practiced by a lot of refugees from Torrance garages with rags in their pockets and wrenches in their hands. The kind of guys who called the wife “the old lady” and chewed tobacco and had a gun rack in the pickup truck.

Mario was not exactly a viscount or the Marquis de Portago, but his story was as American as Ellis Island, the one politicians like to incorporate in their Fourth of July speeches.

He had been a homeless waif in Northern Italy with his twin brother, Aldo, when World War II was coming to an end and world tribunals were affixing arbitrary international boundaries without regard for the starving children in displaced-persons camps.

The Andretti twins came to America, to Nazareth, Pa., where, luck would have it, there was a dirt auto track around which sprint cars dodged each other and slow death. “We knew about auto racing, but who knew from dirt cars?” Mario said.

Since the Andretti boys went 5 feet 6 and weighed about 120 pounds in their winter coats, the basketball courts or baseball diamonds held no allure for them. But when Mario climbed in a race car, he knew he had found more than a career, he had found a home.

Aldo was not so lucky. He was too impatient for this game. He couldn’t wait for the car to catch up to him. Mario was on the way to Victory Lane, but Aldo was on his way to the cemetery. He quit after his second coma.

Sport, like life, isn’t fair. There’s no doubt Indianapolis has mistreated Mario Andretti. But it knows it’s been in a fight. He won once here but was second twice, third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh. He has finished the race eight times, went 194 laps another and positively had the race won in 1987 when he led for 170 of his 180 laps before his engine quit on him.

It’s not always how you drive at Indy, it’s what you drive.

There’s no doubt Indy owes Andretti. He brought a dignity, a style, a class to a brutish sport as only a few did. And the Great Brits, the Queen’s Own, who came and elevated it briefly to drawing room and salon status, soon went back to silk scarf and champagne circuits on the French Riviera.

Andretti ran every kind of American race from dirt, sprints and stocks to mountain climbs. He even defected briefly to European-style or Formula One racing, where he promptly won the championship. He is the only man ever to win Indy, Formula One and the Daytona 500 stock car race. He won only one Indy but 52 Indy car races. They didn’t make the four-wheeled vehicle he couldn’t drive fast--and first.

They’re having a monthlong “ Arrivederci , Mario” tour on the racing circuits. Show business types, governors, chanteuses and every great racing driver he ever locked wheels with attended his testimonial dinner Thursday.

Andretti is slowing down and, as usual, the groan that goes up from the crowd is heartfelt. It was always news that disheartened, like “Ruth strikes out,” “Dempsey is down” or “Montana got sacked.”

His sport--all sport--will miss him. His car owner is the actor, Paul Newman, but his sponsor is everyone who ever brought a stopwatch and a fried chicken to the Indianapolis 500.

He’s teeing it up ninth, at the end of the third row, in his Texaco Lola today. He’s 54 years old. But as usual, you don’t want to find him in your rear-view mirror on Lap 190. because you’ll be in his by Lap 200.

Andretti slowing down is depressing enough for the sport. Not Mario, but the sport itself is black-flagged.