“Well, he must have had something else on his mind because you started dating?”

We booked! Followed the roar of the engines, and here was local half-a-mile dirt track.” And all of a sudden, a big explosion of engines. Right after moving in to their first house, Mario and Aldo noticed a commotion nearby: “Big lights about, maybe, a mile away. And then when Mario was 15, the Andrettis came to America. When he wasn’t abusing other people’s cars, he was at the movies, watching racing, like “To Please a Lady” starring Clark Gable as a midget car racer. When he wasn’t abusing other people’s cars, he was watching American racing at the movies, and dreaming. Whenever I valet the car today, I’m thinking, ‘I wonder if they’re doing the same thing I was doing to these people?’” “So that’s how I learned my standing starts in Formula One, with some of these poor customers’ cars. “We were just testing some standing starts - a little bit of burnouts and so forth,” he recalled.

The family didn’t own a car, but he and his twin brother, Aldo, parked cars in a local garage. Mario Andretti’s road started in Italy, where the end of World War II left his family in a refugee camp in Lucca. “Little kids would think so, anyway,” Andretti offered.

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