![]() The poor family that fetched up in the small town of Nazareth, Pennsylvania, started from scratch and Andretti lived out the American dream. He did so in 1955 and Andretti still remembers arriving beneath the Statue of Liberty on his sister Anna Maria’s birthday aboard the liner Conte Biancamano. The family had been displaced by the war into a refugee camp and his father was determined to take them to America. He was named US driver of the year in three separate decades: 1967, 19.Īn ambition to compete in F1 had gripped him since, aged 14, he watched Alberto Ascari at Monza in 1954. He remains the only driver to have won the F1 title, the Indianapolis 500 and the Daytona 500. He won the F1 championship with Lotus in 1978 but his career was long and successful across so many disciplines. “If you are a race fan and for those of us for whom motor racing is our life, you see something gaining this level of interest and it doesn’t get any better than that,” he says.Īndretti’s opinion rightly still carries weight. With three scheduled for 2023, the sport is riding a wave of popularity not seen since the 60s and 70s and Andretti is revelling in it. F1 is back to stay in the US.”į1 is enjoying a new dawn in the Florida sunshine this weekend, the first of two races in the United States this year. It is going to be long term, I can guarantee that. “It will be awesome,” he says with the zeal of a true fan. He believes the race in Miami, F1’s first here, is a tipping point. He could not be happier at F1’s American resurgence in the nation that took him in as a child and then took him to their heart. Yet his presence still lights up any event, fizzing with the same exuberance F1 is now enjoying in the country that for so long since Andretti’s heyday looked all but lost to the sport. Photograph: Keystone Pictures USA/Shutterstock Mario Andretti tests the new Alfa Romeo that he will be driving in the World Championship in 1981.
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