John Andretti grew up in the shadow of his uncle Mario and even his cousin of Michael. But John established quite a career for himself. He won in the NASCAR Cup Series. He won in IndyCars. He won the 24 Hours of Daytona. He raced NHRA Top Fuel dragsters. He won on dirt tracks in midgets and sprint cars. He also was the first to ever do “The Double” by racing in the Indianapolis 500 and then flying to Charlotte for the Coca-Cola 600 on the same day in 1994. He was a racer. If it had wheels and an engine, he was willing to race it.
John was diagnosed with colon cancer in January 2017. He fought the disease, gutting through gruesome surgeries and treatments while also raising awareness of the need to get routine colonoscopies with the program called #CheckIt4Andretti. He passed away on January 30, 2020, at his home near Charlotte, North Carolina.
Ten percent of all proceeds from the sale of RACER are being donated to John’s chosen charity, the Riley Children’s Hospital in Indianapolis. You can pre-order the book from Octane Press at OctanePress.com. (If you pre-order before June 21 from Octane, you will be invited to a private Zoom chat with Mario Andretti, John’s son Jarett, and co-author Jade Gurss on June 23.)
Here is an excerpt from his autobiography, RACER, as told to writer Jade Gurss. John describes his second season with the Cale Yarborough-owned team and their victory in the 1997 Pepsi 400 at Daytona.
For the 1997 season, Cale built a new shop and we had really good engines. For the amount of money we had, they were great engines. RCA outfitted my whole house. Every room had a TV! And a VCR. If RCA made it, it was in our house. They were very nice to us.
CLASSIC RACE: Rewatch Andretti’s win in the 1997 Pepsi 400 | MRN: Hear the radio call of the race
I would take the whole team to lunch every week. It wasn’t like Hendrick Motorsports where it would be buying lunch for five hundred people! It was buying for twenty or thirty. We were a tight group. It wasn’t a factory at all: everything happened in a small area. There were no politics. If you thought you should do it, just do it. You didn’t have to go through this department or that department. It didn’t always work, but we ran near the front quite a bit.
We had finished in the top-five at Talladega and the next restrictor-plate race was at Daytona in July for the Pepsi 400. We had shown we could run at the front, and now was our time to prove it. As the race wound toward the finish, Mark Martin was leading and I was running second. Just like at Talladega.
“I’m going to kill myself if this all comes apart again,” I thought. We had led more than half of the race. “I’m not going to run second.”
Bill Elliott was behind me, and he was a lap down with about twenty laps to go, so he wasn’t racing for position. I pulled out and Bill came with me and helped push me into the lead!
My spotter came on the radio. “For doing that, Bill would appreciate it if you would let him get his lap back if the yellow flag comes out.”
“Tell him that he’ll get it,” I said.
Unfortunately, it didn’t work out, as Bill fell back into the pack. When you’re a lap down, nobody will draft with you. Which is odd because he’s a guy you’d want to draft with. Why wouldn’t you draft with Bill Elliott? He’s a great plate racer, and he wasn’t going to make a mistake.
I was still leading the race with five laps to go. Dale Earnhardt—Big E, the Intimidator, the Man in Black—was running second when the caution flag came out. Ricky Rudd, Michael Waltrip and Hut Stricklin had crashed. The NASCAR officials were doing everything they could to clear the crash so Earnhardt would have a chance to win. I think they literally drug the drivers out of their cars! Honest to God. There was no overtime, there’s no green-white-checkers, so they only had a few laps to do it. It was the Pepsi 400, not the Pepsi 405.
Under caution, Earnhardt pulled up next to me, weaving his car at mine.
“I’m not letting this guy get to me. I’m going to stay focused.”
I was looking straight ahead at the pace car.
With two laps to go, crew chief Tony Furr said, “You’re gonna get what you wished for, they’re going to throw the green the next time by.”
“Wished for? Who the hell ever thought that?” I wondered. “The record book isn’t going to say, ‘He finished under caution.’ And who cares if it does? I still win the race.”
But it was all because of that black number 3 behind me.
Tony was telling me, “Make your shifts: clean shifts. You gotta do this . . . and that.”
“What?” I was thinking. “At this point, I don’t need coaching. I need a gun to hold him off!”
Knowing we were going to get one green-flag lap, my mind was racing. “What is Earnhardt going to do to me? He is going to outfox me somehow.” His reputation played a big part in psyching out the competition, so I had to be able to think clearly about what he was going to do. He was going to race to win this thing, and I had to stop him no matter what.
We came around Turn 4, and he started slowing down. He was trying to leave a gap so that when we got up to speed, he could slingshot past me. So I started slowing down, too. We might have been going 30 miles an hour when the green came out! I hit it just right and took off.
Dale Jarrett started behind Earnhardt, but instead of pushing him, he jumped out next to him. Now, they’re side by side. I had a gap, but I had to make sure I could keep it. The more they stayed side by side, there was no way somebody was going to catch me. We came off of Turn 4 and there’s a huge seventeen-car crash behind me, but we still had to race back to the finish line. I looked in my mirror and I saw the rooster on the hood of the Kellogg’s Corn Flakes car. Terry Labonte had a big draft, but I didn’t have to block. I just drove my normal line. Thank God, because I had made enough mistakes around Terry that I would have deserved to have been dumped going to the line. The next lap, he probably would have won. Earnhardt finished fourth.
I was relieved and then I was glad! I wasn’t glad because of all the carnage, but what did NASCAR think was going to happen? Just one lap to finish it? There was going to be a crash, no doubt. And it happened. Luckily, we were in front of it all.
You can’t win the Kentucky Derby riding a mule, and we had a fast car that day. We led 113 of the 160 laps, which felt good. It felt great to win for Cale and the entire team. Our team lunch was fun that week!
The next weekend, we raced in Loudon, New Hampshire. I called RCA and said, “Bill Elliott had a part in me winning this race. What do you think about giving him a TV?”
I took the RCA catalog over to Bill when he was already sitting in his car before practice.
“Here’s the catalog. Tell me which TV you want and we’ll send it to you,” I told him.
“Are you kidding?”
“Nope. I appreciate you giving me the push.”
He ordered the biggest thing he could find in that catalog! That’s what I would have done, too. We had an eighty-inch RCA TV in our basement, and I think that’s what he ordered. But it was worth it. It was a big win for RCA, and a huge win for me. I was now a winning NASCAR Winston Cup driver.
