![]() ![]() 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. His Holman-Moody team was a powerhouse of the era He was also hand-delivered a rock-solid team by Ford. ![]() 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 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. 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. 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. 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. It was a “one-off race,” but Andretti was no stranger to NASCAR or Daytona To understand how his triumph came to be, let’s consider three important points: 1. 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. “It was so incredibly rewarding mainly because I didn’t luck into it.”Īndretti made 14 NASCAR Cup Series starts in his life, and the 1967 running of the 500 served as his only top-five finish. Nobody can say that,” Andretti, who led 112 of the race’s 200 laps, said in 2016. 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. Anyone who enjoys the game should check out Andretti Racing, a sequel released in 1997.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. Overall, a solid racer that offers a few new ideas and decent realism, if not earth-shattering. The game's best feature is undoubtedly the innovative "career path" option that tracks your progress from rookie to circuit champion- a really cool feature for its time that was sadly not followed up on by later games. a nifty little title that challenged racers to a variety of series and then allowed them to spend the resulting prize money as they rose through the ranks to "Championship Cars." The drive was only fair, even for the time, but six different car types. I'm no fan of early 90's 3D polygons in racing games, but Mario Andretti offers pretty cool racing action for its time. Features a fun career mode and a nice selection of different tracks and cars from Sprint Cars, Stock Cars to Formula One and Indy racers. Nice 3D racer from Canadian racing game experts Distinctive Software.
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