One-hit wonder: Mario Andretti manhandled the field (and his car) to win Daytona

The Athletic will be telling the stories of our favorite one-hit wonders in sports during the next week. 

Over 53 years have passed since Mario Andretti won the 1967 Daytona 500. In that time, the win itself and his treatment during that year’s Speedweeks — both from other competitors and his own team — is a dubious tale that grew exponentially taller.

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What can’t be argued, though, is what the win meant for Andretti’s legacy and for the profile of the race itself — the winner and the event, with time, raised the credibility of one another. It was a legitimate race victory for Andretti, one the auto racing icon appreciates because there’s no “Daytona luck” attached that ignores the narrative and skews the result.

“I didn’t luck into it. Nobody can say that,” Andretti, who led 112 of the race’s 200 laps, said in 2016. “It was so incredibly rewarding mainly because I didn’t luck into it.”

Andretti made 14 NASCAR Cup Series starts in his life, and the 1967 running of the 500 served as his only top-five finish. His victory as an interloper drew immediate shock among those unfamiliar with his bona fides — the tongue-in-cheek headline of that night’s Philadelphia Evening Bulletin was “All of Dixie Mourns Andretti’s Victory.” But with hindsight, the surprise and disdain associated with his win dissipated — he’s Mario Andretti, after all — and within the context of the race weekend, his stout performance made plenty of sense when considering what we know to be true.

To understand how his triumph came to be, let’s consider three important points:

1. It was a “one-off race,” but Andretti was no stranger to NASCAR or Daytona

Including his qualifying race that week, which counted in the point standings and the record books, Andretti made six NASCAR starts prior to winning his Daytona 500, four of them at Daytona, and registered a 37th-place finish in the prior year’s 500 while driving for Smokey Yunick. So, not only was Andretti known for being the two-time reigning USAC Champ Car title-holder, but those in the Cup Series garage area were already familiar with the diminutive Italian and how well he wheeled a stock car.

His relationship with Ford, for whom he provided eight wins and nine poles during the 1966 Champ Car season, gave him carte blanche in any driving opportunity he wanted. He was part of the manufacturer’s sports car efforts, and with that came experience driving on Daytona’s road course — where he familiarized himself with the track’s famous high banks, unique for the time, given the lack of similar superspeedways.

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No, this wasn’t exactly tantamount to thousands of hours on iRacing, but he arrived to Daytona in 1967 with ideas of how to attack those daunting corners — restrictor plates hadn’t been implemented yet — to separate himself from others with faster race cars. He was also hand-delivered a rock-solid team by Ford.

2. His Holman-Moody team was a powerhouse of the era

Holman-Moody, Ford’s de facto factory NASCAR team, had won 53 Cup Series races with seven different drivers in the nine years leading up the 1967 Daytona 500, and supplied cross-genre legend Dan Gurney — a driver considered by Andretti as an inspiration — with his first NASCAR win at Riverside in 1963. Andretti’s pairing with the team felt appropriate and was a considerable step up in stock car racing equipment compared to the smaller teams for whom he’d previously competed.

Fred Lorenzen was the team’s obvious bellwether, at the time a winner of 25 Cup Series races, and while it was likely massive blow to Andretti’s ego to be considered anything short of a team’s No. 1 driver, Holman-Moody supplied its unorthodox part-timer with a commensurate racing mind and an equally unorthodox team leader: “Suitcase Jake” Elder, arguably one of the five greatest crew chiefs in NASCAR history, who’d go on to wrench for the likes of Dale Earnhardt, David Pearson and Darrell Waltrip.

Andretti believed he was down about 400 RPM to the field’s most competitive cars when he practiced and qualified, so the workaround he and Elder built for the race was one which fans of today’s NASCAR are likely familiar: high downforce. Running a spoiler smaller than most was legal at the time, and supplied him good enough speed (he finished sixth in his qualifying race), but it was havoc to handle, both in clean and dirty air.

Fortunately, Andretti was one of the best in the world in the precise thing he needed to succeed with the car he helped set up.

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3. Draft being equal, Daytona is a handling racetrack — and Andretti outhandled everyone

When we think of Andretti, our thoughts turn to open-wheel racing, either at Indianapolis — where he only won once in 29 tries — or on the road courses of Formula 1, where he earned 12 wins and won the 1978 championship. We don’t think about his dirt racing background, but perhaps we should.

Andretti and his twin brother, Aldo, cut their teeth on dirt tracks near Nazareth, Pa. While driving under the USAC banner, he competed on dirt tracks regularly; the year prior, he won at Langhorne Speedway, a mile-long dirt oval in Pennsylvania. He’d go on to win at the Du Quoin Fairgrounds in Illinois. Driving “sideways” wasn’t abnormal to him, and those repetitions only increased his car control.

So his loose condition in race trim at Daytona, while appearing out of control to the eyes of skeptical competitors, fell right smack into his wheelhouse. His line around the 2.5-mile track was like nothing observers had ever seen.

“I’d go into the turn fairly low and let it drift so I could use a lot of throttle,” Andretti said. “We had a lot of power — about 750 hp — because there were no restrictor plates then. As new as I was, even to the sport, when something felt good I sure as hell knew it, and I went for it.

“The car was more loose on the frontstretch than in the corners. I had to really watch it through there. I was right on the edge the whole race, but it was manageable.”

Andretti would later suggest his pit crew purposely kept him on the jack as to allow Lorenzen a chance to make up time, and while the existence of rogue pit crew members is plausible, any inference of high-level sabotage seems a bit rich given the nature of how he and Elder outhandled the field on a track crew chiefs to this day maintain is a maze when searching for proper handling. Drivers who can manhandle the car make a significant difference, when speed and the equalizing draft are all relative, and Andretti proved a difference-maker.

If there are hard feelings now, it didn’t keep Andretti from continuing his relationship with Holman-Moody back then; in the seven other times Andretti would choose to compete in NASCAR, all came behind the wheel of a Holman-Moody car, six of them with Elder as crew chief.

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Interestingly, Andretti compared his effort in the 1967 Daytona 500 favorably to his attempts at — ahem — another crown-jewel event.

“I don’t know that I ever drove a 500-mile race where I had to stay as concentrated as I was in that one.”

(Photo: Associated Press / The Athletic Illustration)