This Father’s Day weekend, three generations of Andrettis will express their love for one another in a way unique to motor racing families–by driving in four far-flung locales.
Mario, 60, will try to add the only jewel still missing from his magnificent resume–a victory in the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Son Michael, 37, will compete in CART’s Detroit Grand Prix. Michael’s son, Marco, 13, will try to increase his points lead in the Yamaha Sportster Go Kart series in a meet at Port Jervis, N.Y.
One Andretti father-son act will be together, “at home”–Mario’s twin brother, Aldo, will be in the pits while his son John, 37, drives in the NASCAR Pocono 500 near the family hometown of Nazareth, Pa.
But look deep into Aldo’s heart and mind and you probably would find he’d rather be driving somewhere. Life-threatening injuries on a Pennsylvania dirt track in 1959 when the twins were 19 ruined his own racing ambitions. Otherwise Mario always has believed, Aldo might have been the best Andretti driver of them all.
It was on this same weekend at Pocono in 1988 that Bobby Allison was gravely injured in a Winston Cup race. Son Davey kept driving by the wreckage under caution, wondering whether his father were dead or alive, but went on to finish the race. It took hours to notify son Clifford, who was out on the road alone somewhere in the Southeast, towing his short-track car from one small-time race to another.
Yet in 1989, the brain-damaged Bobby Allison limped into the garage area at Daytona and said, in the slurred words of terribly difficult speech, “I . . . am . . . glad . . . that both Davey . . . and Clifford . . . are . . . out there . . . competing. Because . . . I believe . . . there is a lot . . . more good . . . out there . . . than bad.”
“I meant that–still do,” a largely recovered Bobby Allison said a decade later, even after Clifford had died in the crash of a Busch car at Michigan Speedway in 1992 and Davey had died in a helicopter crash into the Talladega infield in 1993.
John Andretti will be driving a car Sunday owned by Richard Petty, as a teammate to Kyle Petty–whose 19-year-old son, Adam, died in a crash at Loudon, N.H., on May 12, the Friday before Mother’s Day.
So the chronic question arises again, somehow more resoundingly on this Father’s Day weekend: Why do so many sons of racers become racers?
The heredity of nerve and reflexes aside, the first tangible factor is conditioning.
“Growing up the kids were exposed to all sorts of motorized toys,” Mario said of sons Michael and Jeff and daughter Barbara Dee–who in adolescence was the most daring of the lot on jet skis, dirt bikes and Go Karts but decided not to race.
While other children’s reflexes are trained at batting, dribbling, throwing and catching, racers’ kids grow up shifting, clutching, braking and accelerating. They seem “natural” at it and constantly are exposed to the big time on weekends with their fathers. Then, when they want to race, their fathers can give them entree with teams and sponsors. The bigger the surname, the better.
The sons race almost always with their fathers’ blessings, but almost never with their mothers’. Kyle Petty once said the most difficult part of getting Adam into racing was getting Adam’s mother’s approval. Marco Andretti in 1991, when he was 4, was zooming across his father’s estate on one of those four-wheel all-terrain vehicles that now bear stickers warning no one younger than 18 should ride them.
“He just flies,” said an anxious and wincing Sandra Andretti, Michael’s first wife, Marco’s mother. “At first I told Michael, `This is crazy,'” she said. “Michael said, `No, you don’t understand–this is life.’ I said, `No, this is crazy.’ Michael said, `No. This . . . is . . . life.'”
The enormous risk “is always with you,” Mario said. “Look at Adam Petty . . . and look at the injuries Jeff [Andretti] suffered at Indy [in 1992, when Jeff’s feet were crushed in a crash]. He will never walk normally again, and we all know that.”
Yet when Marco Andretti told his Nonno Mario, his Grandpa Mario, that he wanted to race, “I kind of sat back and chuckled,” the patriarch said. “I said, `Here we go.'”
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Hot laps: At last, a Winston Cup driver is candid about the points system.
“I personally don’t like racing for points, but that’s what we have to do,” Jeff Burton said. “I hate when you have a bad day and lose so many points you feel like your year is done. Points racing takes a lot of fun out of it.”
In racing to salvage point status, “You’re a whole lot less likely to take chances,” he said.
Which brings up our longstanding solution to racing toward a season championship without detracting from the original intent, winning races: One victory should equal one point, with no other points awarded. At the end of the season, the driver with the most victories is the champion. Isn’t that the way it works in other sports?
When Elliott Sadler flipped wildly during practice last Saturday for Sunday’s Kmart 400 at Michigan Speedway, it marked the first time a Wood Brothers-owned car has gone over on its roof in the family’s 50 years of fielding Winston Cup cars. But that may be largely a testimonial to the Woods’ drivers over the years, which have included Marvin Panch, Tiny Lund, Cale Yarborough, A.J. Foyt, David Pearson and Dale Jarret. . . . Formula One driver Heinz-Harald Frentzen visited Indianapolis Motor Speedway recently and said the new road course, constructed especially for the Sept. 24 U.S. Grand Prix, will be “the fastest track we’ve ever raced on.” But Frentzen, 33, is too young to remember when F1 raced on the old configurations at Monza, Italy, and Nurburgring, Germany, where speeds regularly approached 200 m.p.h.