This year however, with a month's warning I was able to hold an informal Facebook poll to see what others thought. Answers varied from "time" (rather good), to "life itself" (ha). My real purpose however was just to see if anyone else was thinking along the lines I was, and of course the answer to that was, "No, of course not, what a stupid question." Because you know what I think a father's greatest gift to his offspring is?
A target.
We don't talk about it much, but even in your pipe-dream 1950s nuclear family, fathers and sons have a complicated relationship. Right from day one they're competing for attention from the mother, which is only made more tense by the fact the eldest son is typically a mother's favourite (daddy tends to gravitate to the youngest daughter... which sounds dirtier than I meant it to, but oh well). Then there's the basic contest for dominance that will occur between any two creatures with a lick of testosterone, complicated by the fact that one of them taught the other everything he knows, and (ideally, at least) they both love each other as well. A father will be overcome with that kind of pride completely bereft of ego to see his offspring is growing great enough to actually cause him trouble, but at the same time he'll double down to stay ahead. It's a pas-de-deux of of love, duty, mutual admiration and ambition, and like a Tool song it spirals out forever. Even someone well practiced at playing Tetris with emotions would have a hard time getting to the bottom of it, and in our society, most men aren't.
Which makes me wonder if the racetrack might be one of the healthier places to take this stuff – out there the rules are clear and the stopwatch doesn't lie, so measuring yourself against your own flesh and blood is simple. It's either "Congratulations" or "Keep practicing": there's no room, or need, for bitterness.
Which brings me to the Andrettis.
Nonno Mario
Mario Andretti is a true American success story. His love affair with racing began when he and his twin brother Aldo witnessed the great Alberto Ascari hustle his Ferrari at the grand old lady Monza. But then his family had boarded a steamer to the U.S., and the dream of racing at Monza and becoming World Champion one day seemingly faded... until they arrived in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, and heard the familiar roar of racing engines. It turned out they had auto racing in America too, and Mario threw himself into it with gusto, starting with stock cars and steadily rising up the ranks of USAC midget, sprint and finally championship cars. He might have learned his craft on the dirt ovals, not the open roads of Italy like his hero Ascari, but it didn't matter: Mario won on the smaller ovals, taking the USAC National Championship in his first full season in 1965 – then on the bigger ones, claiming the Daytona 500 in a Holman-Moody Fairlane in 1967, then the Indianapolis 500 in a Brawner Hawk in 1969.
USAC championships for 1966 and '69 had also come, but Formula 1 remained unfinished business. When the chance came to switch to the European series full-time, he jumped at it, crossing the Atlantic with American team Vel's Parnelli Jones Racing – a tie-up between 1963 Indy 500 winner Parnelli Jones, and his business partner Vel Miletich. Unfortunately, it wasn't the longest-lasting F1 team in history: finding the costs a lot higher than USAC and the prize money much stingier, they quit F1 in mid-season 1976 – without telling Mario.
I found out in the cockpit at the start of the race at Long Beach. The commentator said, "Mario, how does it feel to be in your last F1 race?" I said, "Do you think I'm going to kill myself or something?" He said, "Vel Miletich just announced this is his last race." Vel hadn't said anything to me.Happily, his contract with VPJ had only been a payment schedule, so he was able to tell Miletich to wipe his backside with it and stay in Europe. Colin Chapman had just lost his star driver Ronnie Peterson, so Mario was able to fill his seat at Lotus in the knowledge Colin was busy working on something very special – the first ground effects cars. After two years of polishing the concept, Andretti struck out with the Lotus 79 and won the 1978 World Championship in style, clinching it in the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, where the dream had begun all those years ago.
That was it: Mario had nothing left to prove now. But of course, away from the track he'd also had a life, and in 1962 he and his wife Dee Ann had their first son, Michael.
Mimmo Michael
Michael Andretti's path to racing was very different from his father's. He cut his teeth karting, won a Formula Ford championship in 1981, then Formula Super Vee in 1982 and Formula Mondial (intended to replace Formula Atlantic) in 1983. Between breezing the junior formulae, and the serious name recognition that came with being an Andretti, it was almost inevitable that he would make the final step to IndyCar, and he made his debut with the Kraco team in 1984.
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By then, the Andrettis' careers were as intertwined as their home lives: Michael owed his career to his father Mario, of course, but Mario also owed his current seat to his son. The early 1980s had seen CART take in refugee teams from the defunct Formula 5000/Can-Am series, one of which was a partnership between cigar-chomping businessman Carl Haas and Hollywood royalty-slash-amateur racer Paul Newman. Haas and Newman had run competing Can-Am teams, and since the Chicago-based Haas was also the American distributor for Lola Cars Ltd (who built successful cars of all types – F1, CART, Can-Am, Formula 5000, the lot), Newman had frequently been in his office complaining about cars that were delivered late or overweight. But with Can-Am coming to an end, both needed a fresh challenge, and although potentially lucrative CART was too expensive for either to manage alone. A partnership made sense, especially since Haas had first dibs on the products of one of the world's preeminent chassis-makers. They just needed a great driver to complete the package, someone who could wow the sponsors as much as deliver on-track results.
Haas had been working on that: guess who'd own the team in which Michael won his Formula Ford title? And with Michael in the team, there'd been plenty of access to the proud father Mario, who often came to watch his son race and was finding life with Team Lotus in the 1980s wasn't the experience it had been in the 1970s.
Working with Colin was no trip to Paris, you know? He and I had some monumental arguments. We were struggling. Colin was getting bored and was looking for something totally new which never really materialised. Colin used to detest it whenever a driver volunteered some engineering suggestions. He was: "Just drive the bloody thing!" and I was: "Yeah, I’ll drive the bloody thing but I can’t drive it because you don’t know what you’re doing!" We used to really go at it.[As an aside, this was the era when Chapman committed Lotus Cars to do detail work for the DeLorean project, which ended with John DeLorean going to prison for drug trafficking and Her Majesty's auditors going through Lotus' murky financial records with a fine-tooth comb. The stress was probably a factor in Chapman's fatal heart attack at the end of 1982.]
So thanks to his dad, Michael had a seat in a top CART team, Kraco Enterprizes; and thanks to his son, Mario also had a seat in a top CART team, Newman-Haas Racing, the longest partnership he would have with a single team. Their paths were set to collide in Portland, Oregon, on 15 June 1986.
The Budweiser/G.I. Joe's 200
In June '86 both Andrettis were riding high. Mario had won his fourth IndyCar title two years earlier (and fifteen years after the last!), while Michael had taken his breakthrough win only the week before, in a 200-miler at the Milwaukee Mile. Winning changes a person, as Alain Prost once told us: "Before you thought you could do it; now you know you can." Buoyed with confidence and beginning to that sweet spot between seasoning and aggression, Michael was out to prove Milwaukee had been no fluke. 104 laps of the 1.9-mile Portland International Raceway were all that stood between himself and glory.
His car was a March 86C, the latest evolution of the '85 March chassis which had been partly designed by his race engineer – an aero whiz kid from Britain by the name of Adrian Newey. As such it had a slight edge in downforce compared to the Lola T86/00, but as Lola's distributor (not quite their works team, but definitely their preferred customers), Newman-Haas could race no other. Engine-wise nearly all teams were using the Cosworth DFX, a turbocharged, methanol-burning 2.65-litre development of the legendary DFV. Andretti might've stayed in Europe, but VPJ had brought the DFV home to America and done the hard work of turning a 500hp F1 engine into an 800hp IndyCar engine.
One exception was our own Geoff Brabham (another second-gen driver), who was giving a very early version of the Honda Indy V8 some precious racing mileage. The others were the three Penske team cars, who ran Roger Penske's own chassis (the PC-15, which was somewhere between the March and Lola in downforce), and a new Ilmor-built engine that would one day be known as the Chevy/A.
A wet qualifying session meant pole position had gone to one of Penske's drivers, a Brazilian "rookie" by the name of Emerson Fittipaldi, driving the #20 Marlboro entry. But the moment the pace car released the field, it was clear this was Michael's race to lose – he streaked away in the #18 Kraco March and never looked back, building a gap of 3.7 seconds by lap 3, 10 seconds by lap 18, and 11 seconds by lap 27. On lap 31 he pitted, a little earlier than the other planned two-stoppers (the window opened around lap 35), but after the rest cycled through he was still in the lead, which he would hold until lap 52. He lapped the field all the way up to 10th place.
Mario didn't even rate a mention until lap 39, where he was seen in a scrap with Geoff Brabham over 6th and 7th places – no danger there, it seemed. On lap 58 Michael came up to put a lap on him, dive-bombing through the tight final corner and giving Mario's right-front tyre a love tap on the way through. That would've sent a vicious shock through the steering rack and straight into Dad's wrists, but if he had a complaint about that we never heard it. So Michael had now lapped everyone up to 7th place.
By the middle of his second stint, however, Michael was losing ground: the man catching him Danny Sullivan in the #4 Miller Penske, who was steadily clawing the gap back – 11.7 seconds, then 11.0, 10.4, 9.6, 8.5, and on it went. Some of that, crew chief Barry Green said, was Michael turning the boost down to conserve fuel, but there was also no doubt the Penskes would gain substantially at every pit stop as they'd recently adopted the F1 innovation of tyre warmers. Sullivan and Fittipaldi (who was trying for a one-stop strategy) would be straight back on the pace on their outlap, whereas Michael would have to take some time to warm up his tyres before he could push.
So by the time he lapped his father Mario, Michael's gap back to Danny Sullivan was only 1.9 seconds. Some of that was down to traffic however, as by lap 67, after negotiating the backmarkers himself, Sullivan was back to 9.2 seconds behind. By now there were only three cars still on the lead lap – Michael, Sullivan and Fittipaldi.
On lap 70 Michael made his second stop, and something must have gone wrong, because thanks to a brilliant stop from the Penske team (and some pre-warmed tyres), Sullivan managed to leapfrog him and assume the lead. Michael tore off after him, but when he failed to find a way past on the outlap, the team radioed him to cut it out, turn the boost down from the maximum 48inHg to 45 (1.6 bar to 1.5, or if you prefer 24 psi to 22), and save some fuel. Sullivan had deprived the Andrettis of a second Indianapolis 500 two years earlier, when he'd spun trying to pass Mario but hadn't actually hit anything; recovering, he'd hooked a gear, rejoined the race, tried the same move again and made it stick, ever after earning the nickname "Spin & Win". He was looking pretty good to deprive another Andretti of the win here today, and complicating matters, Fittipaldi's one-stop strategy was beginning to look rather brilliant as he slowly but steadily reeled in them both.
But then, around lap 80, both Penske cars were abruptly eliminated, virtually within a minute of each other. Emmo's clever strategy came to nought when his Chevy V8 simply exploded, sending him back to the pits with a DNF. Then at the front Sullivan hit traffic, and Michael had his chance. He caught up through the Turn 4-5-6 complex, then pulled alongside through Turn 7. Bravely, he drove around the outside of Sullivan through the turn, but couldn’t find enough purchase to finish the pass in a single corner. Side-by-side they raced out of the complex and onto the back straight, but crucially, there was a slight kink before the straight proper. The contest between the two most aggressive drivers in the field could only end in tears: moving across to take his line, Sullivan’s left-rear overlapped with Michael’s right-front and the Penske spun dramatically out of control, whizzing across Michael’s nose and slamming sideways into the tyre wall in a cloud of dust. There’d be no spin & win today. As the car came to rest, the left-hand side of the Penske was mangled beyond recovery.
The impact had punctured Michael’s right-front tyre however, so he skated back to the pits to have a new one fitted. The team took the opportunity to fit a new left-rear as well, and check for damage, but then he was dropped and sent on his way. But the stop, on top of the slow in-lap, had taken time, and that had put the man behind him back on the lead lap – his father, Mario.
Mario had his own problems, busy holding off Al Unser Jr (yet another second-gen racer) in a Doug Shierson Lola. By lap 90 Michael was still 10 seconds ahead of his father, but he’d now turned the boost down and was having to short-shift, because after that blistering opening stint, the fight with Danny Sullivan and an extra visit to the pits for a spare, he was marginal on fuel. And this was CART, meaning although refuelling was allowed, you only got a finite amount to finish the race, and the team’s reservoir in pit lane was bone-dry. Michael’s lead was shaved from 14.4 seconds on lap 88, to 8.9 on lap 94. This was going to be close.
Five laps to go, and Michael continued to circulate.
Four to go, and there began to be serious concerns his fuel budget was in the red.
Three to go, and in pit lane wife Sandy was looking distraught.
Two to go, and Geoff Brabham was waving Mario by, happy his Honda engine was still running and not caring that he was yet another lap down.
White flag: now only 2.9 seconds ahead of dad, who was reeling him in by two seconds per lap. Lift and coast, just try to meter out those last few drops of fuel...
And then, swinging through the final turn, Michael’s DFX coughed and finally starved, the force of the turn tugging the remaining fuel away from the pickup. He still had momentum and could coast to the finish, but roaring out of the turn behind him, foot hard on the throttle, came his old man Mario. Across the line they were neck-and-neck, too close for the commentary team to call, but down on pit lane they knew the truth: Mario had got a nose ahead. The official timing revealed the gap was 0.07 seconds, or about four inches at race speeds. At the time, it was the closest finish in IndyCar history.
"Funny thing is," said Mario in the post-race interview, a wry smile creasing his leathery features, "I don't pity him at all."
Michael was gutted of course, but chin-up, he said the only things he could: "If anyone's gonna beat me I'm glad it's him. Happy Fathers Day, Dad." The Americans have to do everything their own way, so of course, 15 June 1986 was also Fathers Day.
You couldn't make this stuff up.
Michael the Superstar
Michael Andretti gets a bum rap in F1 circles, remembered only as the guy who was Ayrton Senna's teammate at McLaren for all of five races back in 1993, before he quit to make room for a young and green Mika Häkkinen. But stateside he was one of the greats, taking the CART championship in 1991 on his way to 42 total race wins, making him the most successful driver of the CART era. Today he owns and operates Andretti-Green Racing, one of the power teams of modern IndyCar, and also owns a substantial share of the former Holden Racing Team, which has been renamed Walkinshaw Andretti United in his honour. The man's no slouch is what I'm saying, and didn't seem the worse for wear after the old man put him in his place.
But I still have unanswered questions. Michael was a chip off the old block, an apple that fell right next to the tree, so he and Mario spoke the same language: every one of those 42 wins was Michael telling Mario, "Look what you've done, Dad!" Even when he beat him; especially when he beat him. But what if Michael had found his calling as, I don't know, a tax accountant? How would he have spoken his father's language then? How would he have shown his dad what he'd done? I don't know, and I suspect I won't know for many moons to come.
But right now, I think starting a motoring blog helps.
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