In 1969, a 29-year-old Mario Andretti drove a backup car with a hastily added radiator to the front of the Indianapolis 500 field and won. That Memorial Day at IMS was the start and the end of one of the strangest stories in American sports.
The Andretti racing family has started the Indy 500 more than 80 times. Mario, his sons Michael and Jeff, his nephew John, his grandson Marco. They have led over 1,200 laps. They have finished second three times. They have qualified on the pole. They have crashed, run out of fuel, lost engines, lost gearboxes, and lost races on the final lap. In 56 years since 1969, no Andretti has won the Indianapolis 500 again.
This is the story of the only Andretti win, and the curse that came with it.
Why this matters
The Andretti name is not just woven into IndyCar history. It is woven into Indiana history. Mario raced at IMS for 30 years across multiple decades. Michael ran 16 Indy 500s. Marco ran 19. The team that bears the family name, now called Andretti Global, has won this race five times as an organization. The Andrettis have spent more time at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway than nearly any racing family in history.
For a state that takes its racing personally, an Andretti winning Indy is a story about more than one family. So is an Andretti losing it. Heading into the 110th Running on Sunday, May 24, 2026, it has been 57 years since the only one that counted.
May 30, 1969
Stay IN the Know
Get the best of Indiana delivered to your inbox every week.
The 53rd Indianapolis 500 was run on a Friday. Memorial Day fell on a Friday that year, and the race was scheduled around it. A.J. Foyt sat on pole looking to become the race's first four-time winner. Mario Andretti sat second on the front row, but he wasn't supposed to be there at all.
Andretti showed up that May with a radical new four-wheel-drive Lotus, the kind of car that was supposed to be the future. He'd been trading practice laps with Foyt at over 170 mph, both drivers chasing what would have been historic numbers in 1969. Two days before qualifying, Andretti hit the wall in Turn 4. The Lotus burst into flames. Andretti's face was badly burned.
The team had a day and a half to prep his backup, a two-year-old Brawner Hawk that wasn't supposed to ever see the front straightaway. They stripped it down, freshened it up, and Andretti put it on the front row, qualifying just under 170 mph. The next day, when the front row gathered for the official photo, Mario's burns were so visible that he asked his identical twin brother Aldo to stand in for him. The famous front-row qualifying photo from 1969 doesn't actually show Mario Andretti. It shows his twin.