“That gent I was just talking with,” Mario says, “was one of the mechanics on my Lotus 40 years ago in South Africa. While Mario, who's 82, sits there with me at his table in the Miami paddock, he is approached from all angles, from all eras, as though he’s the Godfather, the voice of whom his strained upper range (no doubt pushed by decades of shouting over screaming combustion engines) and accent (still both Old World and New) resembles.
This year’s inaugural race in Miami and the addition of a new Las Vegas race to the 2023 calendar suggest that the time might finally be right for what the Andrettis call “a true American team.”
Andretti Global could change the face of F1-at precisely the moment that the sport’s organizers are hoping to capitalize on America’s blooming interest. Even Wolff and Horner conceded that Andretti was as big a name as exists in motorsport. But there was something different about the prospect of an Andretti team. (The existing F1 team with an American owner, Haas, had struggled mightily, and there was no appetite for another bottom-feeder.) Any ordinary American team would be dismissed out of hand, they seemed to suggest. Mercedes’s Toto Wolff and Red Bull’s Christian Horner didn’t waste time asserting that, to their minds, any new entry would have a lot to prove-namely, that they could race competitively and bring financial value to the sport. While the determination on Andretti’s bid ultimately rests with the FIA and Liberty Media, which owns Formula 1, team principals have addressed the prospect of a new competitor. the market that F1 had been trying to crack for practically its entire existence. The pitch was simple: A new American team featuring a star American driver (all under the banner of the great American racing name) would serve as the bellows to stoke the flames of the passionate new American fan base, a.k.a. But the convergence of all the F1 power brokers onto their home soil was an opportunity to make their case in person. “He is awaiting the FIA’s determination.” By Miami, in May, Michael and Mario were still waiting.
“His entry, Andretti Global, has the resources and checks every box,” Mario tweeted. In February, Mario shocked the racing world by announcing that his eldest son, Michael, had filed paperwork with the sport’s governing body, the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), to bring a brand-new American racing team and American driver to the F1 paddock in 2024.
But he is also there in a more surreptitious capacity to help ensure that he is not the last bridge, as well. Indeed, he is an official ambassador of the Grand Prix and the most meaningful bridge between American racing fans and the globe-spanning racing series. Mario is in Miami in his capacity as the great connector between American race car driving and Formula 1.
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