In the season's last race, Aldo, the wilder on the twins, crashed, fracturing his skull and going into a coma. They took turns behind the wheel, and in the first four stock-car races, each won twice. In 1959, they began racing a 1948 Hudson Hornet Sportsman.
Soon the boys found work in their uncle's garage and poured their earnings into fixing up a car.
To the surprise of the twins, Nazareth was home to a half-mile dirt track. Settling in Nazareth, Pa., the family had $125 and didn't speak English. States visa, the Andrettis began their new lives in the U.S. He was not yet a teenager when the bug hit him as he read racing magazines and was fascinated by film clips of Formula One racing that were shown during movie intermissions. It was here that Andretti's interest in racing, the most popular sport in Italy in the 1950s, blossomed. Essentially, the Andrettis lost everything, and in 1948, when the Tito regime of Yugoslavia allowed residents of Italian heritage to leave Istria, the family of five (there also was an older daughter, Annamaria) moved to a displaced persons camp in Lucca, about 45 miles from Florence. When World War II ended, the borders were in dispute, and the Istrian Peninsula fell under Communist rule, swallowed up by Yugoslavia. "I don't remember as a kid wanting to do or be anything else but drive something, be a race driver," Andretti said. Their mother Rina said that when they were two, they would take pot lids out of the cupboards and run around the kitchen, going "Vroom, vroom," like they were driving cars. 28,ġ940 in the tiny village of Montona, on the Istrian Peninsula on the northeastern tip of Italy. Mario and his twin brother Aldo were born on Feb.
Whether it was Indy, Formula One, Formula 5000 or Sprint cars, he proved himself a winner at all levels of competition. Vroom! That sound you hear is Mario Andretti speeding around the track. Pedal to the medal and, and go, go, go," says newspaper columnist Bill Lyon on ESPN Classic's SportsCentury series. And he drove like Ben Hur drove a chariot, too. "I remember somebody said at the time, he's the hottest driver out of Italy since Ben Hur. Andretti's only Indy 500 win came in 1969
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