Ending Is Bittersweet for Andretti

All Mario Andretti wanted from his 407th and final Indy car race was to finish, to be running on the track when he saw the checkered flag for the last time.

He came up four laps short, disappointing not only himself but most of the estimated 75,000 who swarmed over the hills of Laguna Seca on a warm Sunday for the final race of the season.

The “Last Lap of Mario,” as the Bank of America 300 was advertised, came on lap 80 with Andretti sitting on pit row, his engine having expired.

The race ended, as expected, with Paul Tracy in the lead on lap 84 in one of Roger Penske’s red-and-white Marlboro Penskes. It was the 12th time in 16 races that a Penske car finished first this season. Al Unser Jr., who clinched the PPG Cup championship two races ago, won eight, Tracy three and Emerson Fittipaldi one.

But the Toyota Grand Prix of Monterey weekend belonged to Andretti, who is retiring after 31 years at the highest level of Indy car racing.

It almost ended before it began. Mario, who started in the sixth row next to his son Michael, got caught in a first-lap scramble caused when Michael spun between the second and third turns after touching tires with Fittipaldi. While sitting in the middle of the track, Michael was clobbered by Bobby Rahal, who could not avoid the stalled car.

Mario was right behind them.

“It was exactly what I didn’t want to happen,” Andretti said later. “When Michael and Rahal got together, I braked hard and someone--I don’t know who--hit me in the rear and punctured my right rear tire.

“It was going to take a lot more than that to take me out. Luckily there was a yellow (caution flag) and I came in and got a new tire. That put me back in the rear (22nd) but I put my nose to the grindstone and worked my way back up. I didn’t take too many chances, I don’t think I made a mistake. I just kept creeping up and I was smiling to myself about finishing in the top 10 when all of a sudden, at the top of the corkscrew, everything just went silent.”

Andretti was in seventh place, just after lapping his teammate Nigel Mansell--also driving in his last Indy car race--when the engine let go.

“It left me just a bit empty, only because I couldn’t finish the race,” Andretti said. “It’s happened to me like this too many times this year. It would have been much nicer if I had made it to the end.”

That was the only sour note of the day for the 54-year-old winner of 52 races, 66 poles, four national driver championships and the 1969 Indianapolis 500 in more than three decades of Indy car driving. And that doesn’t take into account his Formula One world championship, a victory in the Daytona 500 and numerous sports car endurance victories.

After the morning warm-up, when Andretti brought his No. 6 Kmart Texaco Havoline Lola into the pits, he was greeted by crews of nearly all the other teams wearing “Arrivederci, Mario” T-shirts.

“Everything that happened to me today made it the most important day of my career,” he said. “You have to know that in drivers meetings and in the pits, it’s usually war out there. We fight and scratch for every edge, but today there was such an outpouring of emotion, it was just incredible.

“In the drivers meeting, everyone had something to say, a farewell, and then to see all those crewmen in arrivederci shirts, cheering me. Well, I knew right then that I was the luckiest man in the world.”

The race, except for watching Andretti pick and weave his way forward for 80 laps, was anticlimactic.

Tracy, who led 81 of 84 laps to win last year, was even more dominant Sunday. He led every lap, even when he made his two pit stops, and won by more than 21 seconds over Raul Boesel, who had his best finish this year in his last race for Dick Simon. Boesel will drive for Rahal next season.

Jacques Villeneuve, an Indy car rookie, was third as only seven drivers finished on the same lap with Tracy.

It was a profitable day for the young Canadian, who is expected to leave Penske’s team and move to Newman-Haas next year as a replacement for Mansell, who is returning to Formula One. Tracy clinched third place in the PPG Cup standings, behind teammates Unser Jr. and Fittipaldi, which will pay him a $300,000 bonus. Additionally, he collected $10,000 for winning the pole, $25,000 for winning the most poles (four) and $75,000 for winning the race from the pole.

“The car ran absolutely perfect,” Tracy said as his infant daughter, Alysha, clamored into his arms in Victory Circle. “The only time I had the slightest concern was when Little Al (Unser) was out there with a light fuel load and we had full tanks, but after a couple of laps, we managed to pull away. I had the rest of the field covered all day. The car was like magic.”

Tracy, who tested a Formula One car for the Benetton Ford team last month in Portugal, credited that experience with the ease in which he dominated Sunday.

“I had a fantastic test in Formula One and I learned a lot of little things that they do differently,” Tracy said. “A lot of what I learned in Portugal helped boost my confidence today.”

Unser had been involved in a first-lap accident in which he ran off the track after rubbing fenders with Robby Gordon in the first turn. Unser pitted and came out at the rear of the 29-car field but after 70 laps had moved to second place behind Tracy.

A broken transmission on lap 74 prevented the Penske pair from recording their sixth 1-2 finish of the year.