“To be able to really hustle the car like that, the position has to be pretty perfect. The steering wheel was in my chest, and we couldn’t do much about that. “The throttle was so far from me, I had to reach and that is not a natural thing,” Andretti said. There’s a common term in racing when a driver is driving “Ten-tenths.” That means he is driving the race car to its fullest performance level and capabilities.īecause of the less-than-optimal distance in the cockpit to the steering wheel and pedals, Andretti said he was driving “six- or seven-tenths.” “I love my driving so much, I’ll keep doing this as long as somebody is crazy enough to give me a car to drive, I will keep doing it.” “I can’t give up the idea of trying to experience driving a race car as long as I possibly can. “If I can scratch my itch and somebody gives me an opportunity, I definitely will,” he told me. I asked Andretti what an 82-year-old was doing driving a full-powered Formula One car? McLaren PhotoĪndretti will drive the same car this weekend at COTA. Mario Andretti squeezing into the cockpit of the 2013 McLaren MP4-28 at Laguna Seca in Monterey. “Hopefully, we’ll improve some of that for my journey at COTA.” It’s a very important piece that I didn’t want to take a chance unless I felt the actual command of it. “There was not enough leeway in the adjustment of pedals and the steering permission to make me comfortable enough in the car. “I had trouble fitting in the cockpit properly,” Andretti said. It’s a modified Indy car that features two seats, one behind the other, and is capable of approaching the similar speeds to the current Indy car.Īndretti had some issues with seat positioning, steering wheel, and pedal locations in the 2013 McLaren because of the way it is constructed. Thanks to McLaren’s Zak Brown, he made that available to me and it looks like I’m going to have a couple more sessions at COTA this weekend.”Īndretti drives the Ruoff Mortgage Ind圜ar “Two-Seater” – a program that gives VIP and other paying customers high-speed rides around race courses on the Ind圜ar schedule. “It’s a modern enough car to get me to have the real feel of what the current car feels like in so many ways.
“It was purely something I was looking forward to, as you can imagine,” Andretti told me. I had an exclusive interview with the racing legend earlier this week just after he returned from Monterey, California and before he left for Austin, Texas for this week’s round on the Formula One World Championship. Andretti’s F1 ride was arranged by McLaren CEO Zak Brown during a private event that featured a number of classic McLarens.
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