Marco Andretti On His Father’s F1 Career: “If you ask me, it was sabotage”
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May 22, 2008
Ron McQueeney/IMS
The third-generation member of one of racing’s most famous families doesn’t have to look far to find an example of F1’s ruthless nature: His father, Michael, drove in the elite international series in 1993 and came away looking like a failure.
But Marco Andretti said the team his father drove for, McLaren, went out of its way to make sure he didn’t get a fair shake.
“If you ask me, it was sabotage,” Andretti said, as he prepared for Sunday’s Indianapolis 500. “It was.”
“They wanted him to fail,” Andretti said. “I don’t know, it was a very bad deal. The reality of it was, they had Mika Hakkinen ready to come in for a lot less than what my dad was getting paid, and that’s all it was. Right then and there, they had to make him look (bad).”
They would make the car do weird things in the corner electronically, stuff out of his control,” Marco Andretti said.
The situation only improved, Andretti said, when Senna stepped in.
“And I think my dad’s biggest supporter over there was Ayrton Senna,” Andretti said. “Because he was one of the few who knew what was really happening in the team, and I think he believed in my father. It was at Monza that he really said, ‘Give him my car. Give him exactly what I had.“‘
Michael Andretti finished third in the 1993 Italian Grand Prix at Monza, his only top-three finish of the season. It didn’t matter, as Andretti was replaced by Hakkinen in the final three races of the season and returned to race in the U.S.
So given all that baggage, why would Marco Andretti want to try F1?
“Because I want to tackle it, you know what I mean?,” he said.
“I don’t have any other mentality other than to go over there and win,” Andretti said. “Because I think it’s a bigger story if I go over there and fail, really. It really is. Because that’s what people are waiting for, to be honest, over there.”
Michael believes his son has the potential to race in F1, but also thinks he might find happiness by staying in IndyCar.
