Michael and Mario at the 1986 Portland Indy-car race. Immediately after the finish, the cameras caught Michael’s then wife, Sandy, sobbing in the pit lane, while he stood with his father at the center of a mob of fans and TV cameras.
That’s probably what cost me the championship that year.” The “funniest” thing of all? That race, where father beat son by those fateful four inches, went down on Father’s Day.
“That was so disappointing,” Michael Andretti says today.
It turned out Mario beat Michael by about four inches. “Well, it’s perhaps the closest and best Indy-car finish in history!” His father caught him, and the two cars flew by the checkered flag at almost exactly the same time. Joe’s 200, over two seconds ahead of his father, Mario, on the last lap, when he ran out of gas coming out of the final turn. He was about to win the 1986 Portland Budweiser/G.I. 18 March 86C Cosworth, likely with every muscle in his body clenched. SIGN UP FOR THE TRACK CLUB BY R&T FOR MORE EXCLUSIVE STORIES This story originally appeared in Volume 13 of Road & Track. “ is out of fuel, dropping to the inside! And here comes the finish line! Who’s gonna win it?!” The Grand Prix became firmly established as the biggest race in Europe, and in 1908 the US Grand Prize (as it was then called) was held on a 17-mile course on roads around the Island of Hope district of Savannah, Georgia.“He’s out of fuel!” the TV announcer screamed into his microphone. The first ever Grand Prix, for which the ‘Big Prize’ was 45,000 French francs (equal to 28 lb of gold) was held over two days on June 26-27, 1906 on a 64-mile course on closed roads around the historic city of Le Mans. From now on, closed loops of roads – circuits – would become the norm. This aspect was to prove decisive in the evolution of racing, because in 1903, city-to-city events were outlawed due to unmanageable public safety concerns. The Gordon Bennett Cup raced on a route that started and ended at the same place, further building excitement and making it easier for the press to capture the stories and photographs that they needed to fill their pages. It all started when American newspaper baron, James Gordon Bennett, seized upon the excitement that new city-to-city racing fostered and through his newspapers, the New York Herald and the International Herald Tribune, and established the Gordon Bennett Cup in 1900 as a new European event.
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