His Place Is Second : Still Frustrated After All These Years, Mario Andretti Is the Runner-up Again

Mario Andretti slowly made his way back to his garage Sunday afternoon, working his way as politely as possible through the throng.

It was a hero’s welcome for a driver who is one of the all-time favorites at Indy.

Never mind that he hadn’t won the race. Again. Never mind that he had finished second to Danny Sullivan. The fans love him anyway.

Mario Andretti has been racing here since 1965, but his only victory came in 1969. All the same, not one of his fans offered an encouraging word Sunday, or gave him a conciliatory pat on the back. Andretti is no loser.

He simply can’t seem to get that second Indy win. He thought he had it in 1981, when Bobby Unser was penalized a lap for passing under the yellow. Andretti was named the winner--until a few months later when the ruling on Unser was reversed.

It sure seemed that he would get it this time, too, but it was not to be.

“Of course I’m disappointed,” Andretti said. “Second means nothing. Especially here. When you get to a certain stage in your career, winning seems to be the only thing. You get spoiled and I guess I want to stay spoiled. This is a very selfish business.”

Asked what he thought he had to do to get his second Indy title, Andretti smiled and said, “All I can do is try like hell, try like hell and then try like hell.”

Asked if he would be back next year (at age 46) Andretti said that he would keep coming back as long as he has his health. “We’ll get it here one of these days,” he said.

Andretti has been racing at Indy since his son, Michael, was 3 years old. On Sunday afternoon, Michael Andretti finished eighth in the race, doing what he could to help his dad down the stretch.

Just before the final yellow flag came out with seven laps to go, Michael had tried to block Sullivan and slow him down. “I wanted to help my dad, but I was trying to help myself, too,” Michael said. “I didn’t want him to pass me and put me another lap down.”

But Sullivan did get past, so Michael was one of two drivers (Howdy Holmes was the other) between Andretti and Sullivan when the field had to slow on lap 193.

When the green flag was waved, on lap 197, there was nothing more Michael could do but clear the way for his dad to get by--and get on with the chase.

Andretti finished 2.477 seconds behind Sullivan.

Not that it mattered to his fans. The people love Mario so much that they resented some of the questions posed to him by the media. When Andretti was asked about the difference between Sunday’s race (when he led most of the way but finished second to Sullivan) and the Grand Prix race last month at Long Beach (when he led most of the way and beat Sullivan) a fan in a Mario Andretti T-shirt jumped in with the retort, “He ran real well today, too.”

After flashing a smile in the general direction of his fan club, Andretti said, “You can’t have everything going your way every time out.

“We ran the limit. The limit just wasn’t enough. They were getting better, and we couldn’t match it, that’s all. We just plain got smoked.”

At the end, that is. Andretti had led 107 laps when Sullivan took the lead on lap 140.

“I ran as hard as I could all day. I ran everything out of the car every lap. No one made any mistakes. I drove every lap as hard as I could and the crew did everything I could possibly ask for.

“My car stayed the same the entire race. The thing is, we could never make it better, while they (Sullivan’s Penske team) seemed to find something. I saw him coming on before he spun and I knew they had found something.”

On the 120th lap, Sullivan tried to pass Andretti in Turn Two, going low to pass on the inside. But Sullivan went into a spin, sliding high in a cloud of smoke and just missing the wall. Andretti managed to get by without incident.

They both went into the pits on the yellow flag brought on by the spin. Andretti lost the lead to Emerson Fittipaldi for two laps, but, other than that, Sullivan’s mistake was inconsequential.

It gave Andretti the opportunity to say, once again, that even though these ground-effects cars are fast, they are safe. “They say if you make a mistake at these speeds, these cars will bite you, but I think they are as forgiving as any cars we’ve had here. I’ll argue with anyone who says anything different.”

Some drivers have argued that the ground-effects cars are safe when they are along on the track, but that the vacuum they create behind one car is a danger to anything that gets too close--that when the second car comes into that vacuum, it totally loses the suction effect.

Sullivan didn’t fly away. He just spun out.

“I thought it was rather weird that he tried to (pass) there,” Andretti said. “I kind of sucked him in and he took the bait. It was shades of two years ago when (Johnny) Parsons (Jr.) spun in front of me and took me out. In my opinion, there’s no way you can pass in that situation, and he did it anyway. He got a little experience out of that.

“I stayed off the brakes so I wouldn’t spin. I kept my car as straight as possible. I hoped inertia would keep him out of the way and it did.

“It was all smoke for a milli-second and I was blinded by it.”

When the green flag came back out, Andretti regained the lead and held it for another 17 laps--until Sullivan finally did make his pass.

With 60 laps to go, Sullivan took the lead for good.

And Andretti didn’t try to blame his fade on anything or anybody. “It was not any one thing that you could put your finger on,” he said.

“I guess it wasn’t meant to be.”