Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, May 14, 1994 TAG: 9405140022
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: STEVE CROWE KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DATELINE: INDIANAPOLIS LENGTH: Long
"Sometimes you can smile with tears. I'm going to try to smile with my teeth." - Mario Andretti
His last wave at Indianapolis Motor Speedway won't be an obscene gesture. Nor will it be a white flag.
"I've never been at war with the speedway, so there's no peace to make," Mario Andretti insisted, just days before his 29th and final Indianapolis 500.
It's the race he has led or been in position to win more times than Andretti wishes to recall. But he has won only once - in 1969 on his fifth try, which he assumed would be the first of several such victories.
After this season - as the infamous track announcement has gone too often over the years - Mario is slowing down. The May 29 Indy 500 will be his last best chance to erase what he is perhaps best known for - finding so many ways of not winning at Indy a second time.
"I've been happy and I've been disappointed here, no question," said Andretti, 54. "I've led a lot of laps, just not enough of the right ones. But that's the way it is. It's something that, when I reflect on it, I couldn't control.
"When I was, in my way, robbed of a situation, it was just one of those things that I couldn't help."
Andretti has led 556 Indy laps, ranking third behind four-time winner Al Unser's 644 and 1915 winner Ralph DePalma's 612. One lap behind Andretti is four-time winner A.J. Foyt.
Andretti dances around his Indy disappointments with grace, but there is no hiding the hurt. If his reference to robbery is apt, he is probably the most mugged former winner in the Brickyard's victim-strewn past.
Such as 1985, when Danny Sullivan's car did a 180-degree spin on Lap 120 of 200, narrowly missing contact with concrete and Andretti's car, then dueling Sullivan for the lead. Sullivan won; Andretti finished second.
"It was his day," Andretti said. "So how do you explain those things? I don't know; I haven't figured it out yet.
"I even go back to '82, when [Gordon] Johncock won and I was eliminated on the first lap."
A chain-reaction wreck began when Kevin Cogan's car touched that of Foyt, sending Foyt's car into Andretti's before the start-finish line.
In 1987, Andretti started from the pole and led 170 laps before engine problems forced him back to ninth.
"And in '66 and '67," he said, "I probably had as much or more advantage on the field as I did in '87."
In '66, Andretti recalled, "I led the race for 16 laps on seven cylinders" before being parked by a blown engine after 27 laps. "Had that car stayed together, I probably would have won one of the easiest races of my career. But I didn't."
And the following May, Andretti won his second straight 500 pole, was forced to pit early by clutch woes and lost his front-right wheel on lap 59.
But the one that left behind the most pain, Andretti seemed to concede, was 1981. Because of Formula One conflicts that May, Andretti's car was qualified by Wally Dallenbach, who was eighth fastest.
But Andretti was put back to 32nd in the 33-car field for his failure to qualify himself. Once the race began, he moved up quickly, led 12 laps and finished second to Bobby Unser. When official results were released the next morning, Unser had been assessed a one-lap penalty for passing cars during a caution.
That gave Andretti the victory - for more than four months. In October 1981, Unser received a $40,000 United States Auto Club fine - and his third Indy victory back.
"My disappointment is not as much with the race itself," Andretti said. "It was the way it was handled that I will never, in a sense, accept."
In previous years at Indy, drivers Jerry Grant and Pancho Carter had finished second, "but were penalized for basically a lot of the same infractions [as Unser], and were moved back to fifth or sixth," Andretti said.
"That was OK, because the rule book applies only to finishing second. But if you win, even after all the hearings and all the proof was positive that, yes, he had passed the cars and committed the infraction, well . . .
"They decided the lap penalty was too severe because he crossed the finish line first. Well, I'll take a $40,000 fine any day, as long as I can go out there and pick up an advantage of 11 cars during the yellow over my second-place guy toward the end of the race.
"That was the point, in my opinion. And the ones that should be blamed for that, they know who they are."
Andretti confirmed that he threw away the ring he received for temporarily winning the '81 race.
"I looked for it later," he said, "but I couldn't find it."
With each passing May, the 1969 victory becomes more precious.
"Hey, that's the only one I can point at," Andretti said. "You sort of gain a lot of notoriety through it, and a lot of people that don't know the facts assume that you've won it many, many times.
"Believe it or not. And when you say, `Well, I've only won it one time,' they say, `Oh.' It's amazing. But at least I've got that under my belt. Thank goodness I did, because otherwise, somehow, your career's just not considered complete. And that's always unfair in a sense."
Andretti said "some of the monkey's off my back, and it's on Dale Earnhardt's." Though the world's most dominant stock-car driver, Earnhardt has failed to win the Daytona 500 - NASCAR's Super Bowl - in 17 tries.
"And you can't tell me that Dale Earnhardt is a lesser driver because he hasn't won the Daytona 500," Andretti said. "He just hasn't had the luck.
"How do you explain that? I'm sure he doesn't know, either."
Though his IndyCar end is near, Andretti is not stepping from competition entirely. A major racing prize that has eluded him in his few attempts has been the 24 Hours of LeMans, a sports car endurance race.
"I'm leaving that door open," said Andretti, whose best LeMans finish is third. More surprising, Andretti said he might return to Indy as a driver for NASCAR's inaugural Brickyard 400 in August.
For now, the Indy 500 looms largest, starting with today's pole qualifying. And Andretti is working on the smiling-through-teeth part, rather than tears.
"I'm really trying to approach it so that emotions do not stand in the way of what I'm doing," he said.
"I'm pretty much going to be looking at it the same as I have before, or very close to that. What would be different is if I'm in the lead on the last lap.
"Then, before I even cued the microphone, I think you'd be able to hear me."
Keywords:
AUTO RACING
by CNB