I suppose that like a lot of European motor racing fans I have two main memories of Mario Andretti, firstly as the winner of the 1978 F1 world championship, a title supposedly tarnished by team orders and by the fact that Mario drove the best car by far, and secondly as Nigel Mansell's fading team mate in the US in 1993. This book, which covers Andretti's whole career, does not duck these issues. The general view seems to be that by 1993 Mario was past his best, in fact he retired at the end of next season. The 1978 World Championship however is a different story; although team orders did exist; Mario's team mate Ronnie Peterson was to race with and pass Mario if he could, but was to let Mario back into the lead at the end of the race, if Mario had a clear lead in the World Championship. This of course did not cover practice, where the results show that Andretti out qualified Peterson 9 to 5. Even more tellingly the fastest race laps show that Andretti set a best lap faster that Peterson on 8 out of 12 occasions. Away from all the noise that the British press made about the team orders back then I can see how unfair my assessment of the 1978 World Champion was; sure on a couple of occasions Peterson had to run behind Andretti, but on most occasions Mario was just plain faster. And so what if the Lotus 79 was the class of the field, much of it's dominance was due to Mario's abilities as a tester and sorter out of cars. An interesting anecdote in this book describes how Mario would sort out rear tires of slightly different sizes to enable him to fine tune the car to each track.
All in all this is an interesting and well written assessment of Andretti's long a varied racing career and is liberally pepper with quotes from many sources. I particular liked Mario's description of McLaren's might M20 Can-Am car as 'having more power than God' but 'it had tremendous throttle lag. You had to go flat on the throttle 50 yards before the corner so that you had boost pressure to come off the corner. But down the straightaway, man, that thing flew!'. In summary I greatly enjoyed this book and can recommend it to all fans with an interest in motor racing history.
Oh and by the way, I forgot to mention that as well as the 1978 F1 World Championship Andretti won the Daytona 500, the Indy 500, was sprint car champion and Indy Car champion, and nearly won at Le Mans.
David Bull Publishing, 251 pages