Thankfully, for the race fan bored with Nissan's domination of the ATCC, there was at least one alternative in early 1991: IndyCar racing was coming to the Gold Coast.
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The CART before the Horse
One question I haven't heard lately (but which I used to get all the time), is: "F1 versus IndyCar – what's the diff?" It's a question that's mostly gone away since 2008, when IndyCar held its final race at Surfers Paradise, but was fairly frequent around the 2005-'07 era when Surfers was still on the calendar (and confusingly, the U.S. Grand Prix was being held at Indianapolis). Those were the days when people would be surprised when I told them F1 cars didn't run on methanol, or that the Grand Prix in Melbourne wasn't IndyCar race. A thorough investigation of the differences would get lost in the tech weeds pretty quickly, and only be interesting to those who already know, so to sidestep all that let's just say, "F1 is European, IndyCar is American." That pretty much covers it, because all the other differences stem from there.
The CamelCase term "IndyCar" itself is surprisingly recent, dating back only to the 1980s. The "Indy" part refers to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the iconic 2.5-mile oval that remains the fountainhead of the whole sport – you worked that much out all on your own, right? It would be like calling V8 Supercars "BatCar", which would just be stupi... actually, never mind. Point is, there was no such word as "IndyCar" before the 1980s, because until then American insularity meant the term "National Championship" had sufficed. To the wider world, the Indy 500 itself might occasionally make the news, but the rest of the series never did – never televised, only making the papers Stateside, and even then only filling in gaps in the sports page. IndyCar didn't get big enough to need branding until the early 1980s, when CART took over.
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| The start of CART: the 1979 Jimmy Bryan 150 at Phoenix. |
CART – or "Championship Auto Racing Teams" – was the strangler fig of IndyCar, a series that built itself on the history and traditions of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway before snuffing out its rival almost completely. USAC (the United States Auto Club) had failed to cook up a commercial package that took advantage of television, so with the costs heading through the stratosphere the team owners had banded together as CART to do the job themselves. The fans voted with their feet and the rival USAC series had withered on the vine, leaving CART supreme, but the barons thus created for themselves a serious conflict of interest – working as a sanctioning body to determine the rules under which they, as team owners, would compete. This was the first grievance against CART.
The second was their preference for road courses and street tracks. USAC's National Championship had been an all-oval series, but the decline of Formula 5000 in the U.S. had created an opportunity the CART barons didn't want to miss. Riverside, Mid-Ohio, Elkhart Lake – F5000 basically donated their whole schedule to the burgeoning CART series – while F1 did their part by cutting the Long Beach Grand Prix, giving CART a blue-ribbon event second only to Indy itself. Even now, think of palm trees lining the concrete walls of a street track, and you're thinking of CART.
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| Mario Andretti leads CART's first Long Beach Grand Prix, 1984. |
Traditionalists might've grumbled, arguing the shift to the streets took the sport ever-further from its roots on the dirt speedways of the Midwest. But the low overheads of the temporary circuits made financial sense, and despite what some might tell you, these events were popular: fans packed the grandstands and tuned in to watch on TV, and as a result these races made money. There can be little doubt CART's management brought IndyCar to the pinnacle of its commercial success, and as their bank accounts had grown, so had their ambitions. By the early 1990s, they had plans to expand the series internationally, into Australia, Japan and South America – all traditionally F1 turf – and one day perhaps even continental Europe itself, the Formula 1 heartland. Australia would be the guinea pig, the lab test to determine whether it was possible to hold a flyaway race for the benefit of a TV audience Stateside.
Australia wasn't the obvious choice for the first CART race outside North America. The logistics of getting the cars, equipment and teams across the vastness of the Pacific were formidable (indeed, the plane carrying it all nearly ran out of fuel and crashed – yes, really), especially when Japan wasn't yet on the schedule to help amortise the costs. The key was that those costs (to the tune of some $12 million) were being covered by the Queensland government, who wanted to promote their state for international tourism. That meant the race would not be profitable in its early years, and so would be a political football for the two major parties, but that's another story entirely.
The circuit chosen was yet another street track, this one laid around the high-rise hotels of Surfers Paradise on the Gold Coast. With the pits located on Macintosh Island, the cars would race south down the Gold Coast Highway (interrupted by a couple of chicanes), turn sharply left onto Palm Avenue, then left again and scream back up Main Beach Parade (again, interrupted by a couple of chicanes and one brutal left-right kink). From there they ducked through Breaker Street and Hill Parade before negotiating a tight left-hander to rejoin the Highway – a corner sure to be a challenge for these cars, as their turbocharged engines struggled to get the power down. One practice session was all the drivers needed to realise that, with several savage braking zones, this place was going to be hard on brakes, a fact that would be decisive in how the race turned out...
Not only did it show off Queensland as a tourist destination beautifully, Surfers also had the advantage of a built-in motorsport culture, having lost the long-serving Surfers Paradise International Raceway only a few years prior. It was also totally on-brand for CART: the marriage (well, more of a hook-up...) of the sun 'n' sand of Queensland with the Vegas sleaze of the visiting Americans was a match made in heaven, and although it started small, the Gold Coast Indy Carnival would soon become nothing less than a week-long, citywide party. The Miss Indy swimsuit competition was not the sort of thing that could've come from South Australia, a state colonised by Lutherans, and in time the debauchery in the nightclubs (and sometimes trackside...) would become a horrorshow for moral guardians. But in 1991 all that was in the future, and for the maiden IndyCar race the people of Queensland were mostly well-behaved. Mostly...
There was also some actual racing, wasn't there?
Yes, although that wasn't without controversy either. CART moving into an F1 market generated some political unease, as CAMS – the Confederation of Australian Motor Sport, the sanctioning body that ran most racing in Australia – was a member club of the FIA, the sanctioning body behind F1. Seeing a power move by their bitterest rival, CAMS threatened life bans for anyone who raced or officiated at the Gold Coast Indy, so flag marshals, timekeepers and other officials had to come from the great outlaw of Australian racing – Bob Jane’s Thunderdome. That explained the main support act of this all-American extravaganza, NASCAR, as the touring cars wouldn't go within cooee of it.
Similarly, the ATCC's broadcast partner, Channel Seven, couldn't touch the event without losing their rights to the big dance at Bathurst. So as with last year's Eastern Creek enduro, this event was broadcast on Kerry Packer's Nine network, meaning our lead commentator was Darrel Eastlake. He was joined by American expert Tom Sneva, aka. "the Gas Man", who was not only a two-time series champion and a one-time Indianapolis winner back in the USAC days, but also the first driver to officially lap Indianapolis at more than 200mph – a lap time of forty-five seconds flat. Mediating between them was our own Alan Jones, who actually wasn't a bad choice of commentator, and not just because he was a former World Champion. Although he didn't mention it, Jonesy had driven in this series as recently as 1985, when he'd subbed for an injured Mario Andretti in the Provimi Veal 200 at Elkhart Lake. Managed a podium finish with 3rd, too, not bad for his first time driving that car in anger.
Race-day Sunday in fact opened with a 5-lap Celebrity Race to help warm up the crowd, but the only two names I recognised were NRL star Wally Lewis, and Olympic swimmer Grant Kenny (and I only know Kenny's name because of Dick Johnson...). The cars were ordinary production Ford Lasers (i.e. rebadged Mazda 323s), with tiny 1.6-litre engines... which still wasn't small enough to keep the celebs out of trouble!
The AUSCAR race that followed doesn't seem to be on YouTube, but the NASCAR race that followed that certainly is, and frankly it was a shitshow – not mincing words here. It's not that it lacked for entertainment – it had it in spades – but the safety protocols in place proved woefully inadequate for 1,600-kilo cars with up to 560 kW under the bonnet crammed into a narrow street circuit on the Gold Coast. Leaving Walter Giles' #91 Buick Regal in the sand trap at the first chicane rather than towing it to safety was the kind of decision that didn't cut much ice even in 1991, let alone today. The folly of it was confirmed three laps later when Steve Cosson's #77 Oldsmobile Delta 88 had a coming-together with the #71 Pontiac Grand Prix Aerocoupe on approach to that chicane, and hurled himself over Giles' bonnet and into the fence! A couple of inches in the wrong direction and the impact could've been catastrophic.
The Main Course – à la CART
But with the preliminaries over, the IndyCars themselves headed to the grid and started off on the first of several formation laps.
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So what exactly were we looking at here? What were these machines, and who were the men driving them? Well the basics are well-known: open-wheel single-seater racecars, powered by 2.65-litre methanol-burning V8s boosted by a single turbo running at a limited 45 inHg (about 1.5 bar, or 22psi). In this generation of engine, that meant around 720hp at 11,000rpm, maybe 11,500 if you wanted to push the envelope. What might surprise you is that CART was not a spec series, as it is sometimes unfairly remembered, but an open formula like F1. If you wanted to build your own car and engine there wasn't really anything stopping you, and two of the big teams of the 1980s – Jim Trueman's Truesports, and Roger Penske's Team Penske – had chosen to do just that. But this didn't automatically mean they won. For most of the 1980s, the best cars had been made by specialist constructor March, and in 1984 Penske had found his home-brew PC-12 to be less than competitive at Indy, so he'd thrown in the towel and bought a fleet of Marches like everyone else – and, thanks to some stellar driving from Rick Mears, he'd won.
So most teams were better off just buying a car rather than trying to build one. By 1991 March had faded, so pretty much everyone was running a Lola, either their latest '91-spec car (the T91/00) or, if they were short on cash, a secondhand one that was a year or two out of date. These older cars (such as the '89-spec T89/00) were identifiable by their tubbier, more porpoise-like outlines compared to the sleek, needle-like silhouettes of the latest models. They weren't ideal, because the extra drag slowed them down, but if they were all you could afford you didn't have much choice – like little brothers, midfield and backmarker teams got hand-me-downs.
It was the same situation when it came to powerplants. The engine to have was the "Chevy Indy V8", to be retroactively dubbed the Chevy/A once the B-version came out in 1992. This engine had been derided as a knock-off of the venerable Cosworth DFX (the legendary DFV rekerjiggered for Indy rules), but it was a brilliant little engine, which despite the name was built by a relatively young firm called Ilmor, itself a knock-off of Cosworth. These engines had debuted in 1986 with Penske, as Roger had co-financed the project in return for exclusivity. This had rankled the grid a bit but, as a small business just starting out, Ilmor could only turn out so many engines per year, and naturally they only wanted to supply winning teams. So if you wanted one, you had to prove you were the best – without the equipment the best were using. It was the familiar Catch-22 of motorsport, but the cycle was especially vicious here in CART, creating distinct tiers of haves and have-nots. It was driven by nothing more malicious than market forces, but as we Millennials know, there is nothing more malicious than market forces, and it led not a few bitter fans to complain that "CART" actually stood for "Chevy And Rich Team-owners".
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| The DFS was a stopgap; the next Cozza would be better. |
Admittedly, by 1991 the situation was a little better, as Ilmor's contract with Penske had expired and the company had grown enough to make the Chevy/A more widely available... but there were still plenty of teams left scrounging without one. Since the Chevy had forced Cosworth to react, the best alternative was probably Cosworth's latest, the DFS – like the Chevy/A, a DFX where every part was a little bit better. Failing that, the DFX itself was still viable, although its best days were now firmly behind it. For those of a more independent bent, there was also the Judd AV, based on a Honda F1 engine that never happened, which was known to be down on power but often did well in the 500-milers thanks to its ability to sip the fuel and stretch out long stints. And there was also an Alfa Romeo engine on the grid, but its presence was kind of incidental: the project had imploded late last year and the engine would be gone by the time the heartland races rolled around, so its presence in Australia suggested the Patrick team had made the trip with leftover machinery. So for this, the opening race of the 1991 CART PPG IndyCar World Series, the winning ticket was a Lola T91/00 chassis with a Chevy/A engine, and this was the combination all the top teams were running.
The thing was, all these names – March, Lola, Cosworth, Ilmor – they were all a tad British. Most of them were based in the same Midlands valley where most of the world's F1 teams could be found: Marches were made in Bicester, Lolas in Huntington. Ilmor's factory was in Brixworth, and although Cosworth did have a factory rebuilding engines in Indianapolis, the company's main facility was just down the road from Ilmor, in Northampton. Even Penske's cars were built in Poole, Dorset. The harsh fact was the last American-made car to win the Indy 500 had been Gordon Johncock's Wildcat back in 1982, and that was a source of quiet but growing embarrassment to the proud American fanbase. The CART barons didn't seem to care – they needed the best, and if the best was British, what of it? – but it was yet another grievance against CART.
So in an effort to promote “Made in U.S.A.” technology, USAC had also opened up the rules to allow "stock-block" engines, balancing their less-than-cutting-edge technology with that most American of solutions, more cubes. Originally this had meant a limit of 5.8 litres, as USAC tried to tempt some of the NASCAR teams to bring their tuning skills to the Brickyard, but it came too late as an engine big enough to match the DFX in power was now too wide to fit into the narrow fuselage of an IndyCar. Instead, USAC had re-allowed the turbo but dialled back the displacement, meaning if you were willing to forego double overhead cams and limit yourself to two valves per cylinder, you could have 3.3 litres instead of 2.65.
Only one engine had stepped up to the challenge, the Buick 3800 V6 – yes, the same engine that was now under the bonnet of our own VN Commodore. Reduced to 3,300cc as per the rules, its pushrods limited it to around 9,000rpm, which gave it a very flat torque curve that made it both powerful and fragile. Neither of these two characteristics were as important as the third, however: it was cheap. You could pick one up for as little as $30,000, making it a godsend to all the small teams with big hopes.
So in summary, at one end of the grid you had power teams like Marlboro Team Penske and Newman/Haas Racing, both with Chevy/A engines and both with the latest '91-spec chassis (Lola T91/00s for Newman/Haas, Penske PC-20s for Roger). Drivers with this combination, such as Mario Andretti or Al Unser Jr, were in with a chance of winning the race. At the other end of the grid you had guys like Mark Dismal Disney Dismore, who was sitting in an outdated Penske PC-17 chassis fitted with a Buick engine it was never designed to carry. The difference between the haves and the have-nots was startling, as fastest-qualifier Michael Andretti (son of, and now teammate to, the great Mario) had taken pole with a lap of 1:40.047, just 0.043 seconds faster than America's former F1 star, Eddie Cheever. One of the slowest was future 500 winner Buddy Lazier, who had only an '88-spec Lola and a DFX engine and so managed only 1:49.930 – nearly ten seconds slower than Michael in just a single lap! That sort of performance gap would never fly today, but look at it this way: Lazier was on the grid and getting that most precious of commodities for a young racing driver, seat time, and at a fraction of the cost of a REC or a fully-fledged Dallara-Honda. Meanwhile, the frontrunning teams had managed to square the circle of having racing that was on the cutting edge of technology and still close, heart-stopping wheel-to-wheel action. So CART's way of doing things wasn't perfect, and it certainly wasn't what you'd call fair, but it wasn't without its benefits.
Gold Coast Indy Grand Prix
Anyway, the race itself, which came in two halves. The first half was charitably described as "intense", rather than "exciting", as scions of the Andretti and Unser clans battled it out for the race lead. But those who had the patience to stick it out were rewarded, because the second half burst forth into a kaleidoscope of reversals and shifts of fortune, and at the end gave us a wonderfully unexpected race winner.
In a nutshell, Little Al passed Michael for the lead on lap 1 and never looked back, the two of them leaving the rest of the field behind as they rushed off on their own private duel. This duel didn't last very long as it emerged Al had a very slight car advantage – Michael was unbelievably fast diving into the corners but a touch taily coming out of them again, whereas Al's was beautifully hooked up and never misbehaved, making him faster overall. Given they were both driving identical Lola-Chevs, it was illustratrative of how tiny differences in setup and driving style mattered. But before that could really develop into anything, Scott Goodyear crashed at the back kink and brought out an early caution, which was even less interesting to watch than Unser slowly pulling away from Andretti.
Stay with me though, it did get better. Although Unser had an advantage of 4.44 seconds by lap 13, Michael was finding his mirrors filling up with Eddie Cheever, who was only 0.3 seconds behind. Early on lap 17 Cheever made a move at the first chicane and wrestled 2nd place off Michael – only to lose it again when Hiro Matsushita put his car into the wall on lap 19, bringing out yet another yellow-flag period. The leaders took advantage by making their first pit stops while the Pace Car was out, and in the process Cheever got shuffled back behind Michael. By lap 21 the order was Little Al, Michael, Cheever, Bobby Rahal, Mario Andretti and then Emerson Fittipaldi.
Little Al backed them right up for the restart on lap 23, and although plodding behind the Pace Car seemed to've done the car some damage, the exhaust giving a slight puff of greasy black smoke in right-hand turns ever after, it never seemed to affect his pace. Unser continued to lead after the green, still leaving the field behind at a steady rate. Despite that, Emerson Fittipaldi was feeling confident: the two-time F1 champ was famous for his work ethic as a test driver (a necessity when driving for Penske), and had reported that he was very comfortable with the car and fully expected to be there at the end when it mattered. Unfortunately, that idea went to hell on lap 28 when he pitted with a mechanical problem. The team removed the engine cowl to check it out and soon discovered they had a gearbox problem (despite my best Googling, I wasn't able to find out who made their gearboxes. Anyone know?). It was inoperable, so after a long and frustrating stop Emmo's Penske was retired on lap 32.
By lap 37 Michael was driving like a wild animal and catching back up to Little Al, which was no small concern with the next round of pit stops just around the corner. By lap 40 he'd caught up and was ready to try a very brave move, out-braking Little Al into the first chicane in the front straight – around the outside! Al got held up by backmarker Randy Lewis in last year's Lola-Cosworth, so he was vulnerable, but even so both cars were very marginal on grip, tiptoeing through all crossed up with locked wheels. But both negotiated the corner intact, and poor Michael had to stay where he was, unable to make the pass this time. Nothing daunted, Michael tried again in the final complex of turns and this time took no prisoners, imposing himself on Little Al and forcing his way through, simply taking track position away and leaving Al with no option but to yield. Michael Andretti now led the race.
But then on lap 42 things started to happen in a hurry. At the back chicanes, the leaders caught up with another backmarker with the Andretti name – Michael's brother Jeff, who was driving the black Texaco Lola-Cosworth. Michael had to lean on him pretty hard before he got out of the way, but not even Michael got the treatment Little Al did: either not seeing him coming (or seeing a rival racing dynasty coming through and not willing to lift...), Jeff simply didn't leave Unser enough room to follow Michael through. Realising too late that Jeff was taking the line for himself, Unser slammed on the brakes and so lost the rear. The result was a sudden spin entering the back chicanes, his rear wing brushing the concrete and gently separating from the rest of the car. Game over for Al Unser Jr.
Game over, but not crash over. Finding the road blocked, Eddie Cheever couldn't brake hard enough to stop in time and elected to clip the wall just behind Unser rather than pile into his cockpit. Unsighted behind Cheever, Mario Andretti – Jeff and Michael's father! – was forced into the opposite evasive manoeuvre and drove over Little Al's nose, the odd angle on the right-front wheel coming out of that accident signalling the end of Mario's day as well. Just for good measure, Eddie Cheever ended up in the fracas as well, although exactly how was a bit of a mystery.
With that little pile-up the race needed a breather, so naturally the Pace Car came out and sent everyone to the pits. Michael took service from the Newman/Haas mechanics in 14.4 seconds and came out just in time to catch the Pace Car, lest he go a lap down. The caution flags would remain out for the next six laps while the mess was cleaned up, the order being Michael, Mike Groff (backmarker), Rick Mears (Penske), Danny Sullivan (Lola-Alfa) and then John Andretti in the yellow Pennzoil car run by Jim Hall, the nephew of the great man Mario only now entering the picture.
The long caution lasted until lap 49 and Sullivan pitted late in the yellow flag period, leaving us with a brisk 15-lap shootout to the end between Michael Andretti and the man who'd caused the Andretti clan so much anguish in the past – Rick Mears, driving for Penske. When the Pace Car subsided Michael once again caught the rest napping and took off into an early lead, but it was Mears who was on the move now, throwing his Penske around to close the gap, and succeeding.
A note about Rick Mears is warranted at this point. Seeing Mears so competitive on a street circuit was nothing less than a triumph for the man personally, as he'd suffered what really should've been a career-ending shunt at Sanair Super Speedway in St-Pie, Quebec, way back in 1984. Ignore the name, the track was a tiny tri-oval barely eight-tenths of a mile long: early in the race Mears had stuck his nose where it didn't belong and run into the back of another car, bouncing off it and burying said nose in the guardrail separating the pits from the track. The impact had been so severe it had dissassembled part of the guardrail itself, and more worryingly, the front of the car also: Mears came to rest with the front bulkhead and pedal assembly missing. Both his feet had been badly crushed in the impact, and he literally broke every bone in his right foot, all twenty-seven of them; at the hospital there'd been talk of amputating it to save his life. Not liking the sound of that, Roger Penske had intervened to bring in some highly-recommended medical specialists of his own, and Mears began the slow, painful road to recovery. For many years after, however, he'd had trouble driving because his right foot simply wouldn't do what it was told; he won only two races in the next three years, both of them at Pocono, where experience and strategy meant more than outright pace.
So to see a scarred old warhorse like Mears chasing down a hungry tiger like Michael Andretti – on a street circuit, no less – said more than words ever could about his recovery: Rick Mears was back, and he had Michael worried. On lap 55 Michael had a bit of a moment entering the first chicane, over-braking and nearly losing the rear end (some impressive car control was required to get it back in line at all!). It was well done, but it still cost him some time, and that was enough for Mears to close right up for the rest of the lap. Having got into position it was just a matter of time, and at the end of the beach straight he did it, diving into the 90-degree corner and wresting the lead away from Michael in a move that was hard, but fair. Alan Jones opined that Michael had been forced into such a hot pace by Little Al and Eddie Cheever in the early part of the race that he just didn't have enough brakes left here at the business end, which explained why Emmo had been so confident earlier on; at the time of his gearbox problem, he'd been ahead of his teammate Mears...
So Rick Mears now led the race, by 1.53 seconds by the time they crossed the finish line again. A lap later and John Andretti was also ahead of Michael, whose brake problem was apparently becoming critical: John easily outbraked him into the back chicane, and shortly thereafter Michael stuck his Lola-Chev into the tyre barrier in the escape road at the end of the front straight. His brakes had finally given up completely, leaving him no way to stop the car. So the order now had Mears 1st and John Andretti a distant 2nd, with 8 laps to the flag.
John had Bobby Rahal on a late charge behind him, but there was a reasonable cushion between them; the problem was, there was also a reasonable cushion to Rick Mears ahead. It didn't look like the Andrettis were going to get anything much out of this race... until, on lap 63 of 65, it all went wrong for Mears. On the approach to Turn 8, the left-hander after the back straight, Mears managed to dispatch the #19 of Randy Lewis (again!) quite easily, then on the short chute from 8 to Turn 9 he got alongside the #21 of Dean Hall as well, ready to take the line. The problem was, he didn't have enough brakes left to pull off a move like that, and he was forced to point his nose up the escape road. Meanwhile, Lewis had got ideas above his station and decided to follow Mears through his pass of Hall, but too late realised Mears had chosen the wrong braking point and was not going to make the corner. As Lewis pressed the panic pedal he lost the back end and spun, collecting an undeserving Dean Hall in the process. The three cars clattered to a halt on the entrance to the escape road, two of them damaged, and a third (Mears) trying desperately to perform a three-point turn and rejoin. He kept going, but it didn't matter: John Andretti, formerly 2nd, was through and gone, unable to believe his luck.
John Andretti completed the final lap and greeted the chequered flag, clinching his first (and, as it would turn out, only) win in the CART PPG IndyCar World Series. In the process he collected a trophy that was nearly as big as he was (like a lot of racing drivers, he was a tiny, jockey-sized man), as well as a substantial cheque. The Americans had never made any bones about racing for cash, and an Indianapolis winner never needed to work again: lesser races paid less, but even the inaugural Gold Coast IndyCar Grand Prix was worth $126,000 U.S. dollars. Even nicer, some of that would go to car owner Jim Hall, who'd won the championship in the early 1980s but was best known for his Chaparral sports cars in the 1960s. This was Jim's first race back as a team owner, so to win first time out with his new driver was more than either of them had dreamed. When they asked a beaming Jim, "Did you expect that?" he told them straight: "You know I didn't!"
Summing Up
Overall it had been a fine beginning to IndyCar racing on the Gold Coast. Despite the slow start the race had been dramatic and exciting; the winner was likeable and rather wholesome; even the Queensland crowd had mostly behaved themselves. Best of all, pretty much everyone involved went on to have a better year. Rick Mears would recover to win that year's Indianapolis 500 for a record-equalling fourth time, and the tenth for Roger Penske. Although he'd lose that race-ending duel at Indy, Michael Andretti would go on to dominate the championship, winning 8 of the 17 rounds including four of the final five to take his only IndyCar title. That achievement would buy him a ticket to Formula 1, although that would be a very different story. And although he'd never win a CART race again, in 1994 John Andretti would become the first driver to complete "the double" of the Indianapolis 500 and NASCAR's Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte on the same day. Whether in CART, NASCAR, IMSA or even drag racing, John would be famous for his versatility... right up until his death from colon cancer in January 2020, at the age of 56. He will always be missed.
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| Vale, John. |
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