Mario Andretti

Interesting facts

Andretti was born in Montona, in Istria, now Motovun in Croatia. His family lost its farmland when the region was ceded to Yugoslavia in 1947, and they spent seven years in a refugee camp in Lucca without running water before sailing to New York in 1955 with just 125 dollars to their name. He and his twin brother Aldo talked a sympathetic newspaper editor into forging their licenses so they could start racing at nineteen. Aldo fractured his skull and spent 62 days in a coma after a crash, and their father nearly disowned Mario over it. Early in their careers, the twins spread a story that they had raced junior formula cars in Italy purely to intimidate rivals. Mario only admitted publicly in 2016 that the whole tale had been invented. Jim Clark recommended him to Colin Chapman after Andretti finished third, and top rookie, behind Clark's win at the 1965 Indianapolis 500. Clark simply told him to call when he was ready. He started his real Formula One debut, the 1968 United States Grand Prix, from pole position, making him the first driver ever to begin his career race from the front of the grid, after an earlier outing at Monza that year had been struck from the record over a scheduling clash. After winning the non-championship Questor Grand Prix in 1971, Enzo Ferrari offered him the team's number one seat for 1972, but Andretti turned it down, confident another Formula One chance would come his way. It did, a few years later at Lotus. The day after Parnelli pulled out of Formula One in 1976, Colin Chapman told him he wished he had a decent car to offer. Andretti signed anyway, and threw himself so deeply into developing Lotus's ground-effect aerodynamics that he would ask engineers for spring adjustments as fine as an eighth of a turn. Mario Andretti raced in Formula 1 from 1968 to 1982, across 14 seasons as an American driver. He won the World Championship once, in 1978. He scored a total of 180 championship points over his career.