L
LUKE'57
Guest
Race Card #90- What's an "Eye-tal-yun" doing in here?
In some country clubs or "planned" communities this would have been a scandal in the '60's. But in victory lane for the '67 Daytona 500 it made perfect sense.
Victory Lanes are reserved for racers, and winning racers at that, and that describes Mario Andretti to a "T". Yeah, I know, Ford's "T" didn't come along until the next year but that's another story altogether.
It wasn't the first time that Ralph Moody had put together the "yankee interloper beats the established veteran" scenario. But I think that Fred Lorenzen had to have liked it better the first time around when he was the newcomer and used Ralph's strategy to beat the old pro Curtis Turner at Darlington's '61 Rebel 300. This time it was Fred that came up second to the new guy as Andretti posted his first Grand National victory.
Little Mario became one of only two drivers to win both the Daytona 500 and the Indy 500,after winning Indy two years later, on that cool February day. A.J. Foyt became the other when he won the Daytona event in 1972 in the Wood Brothers' Mercury.
Here's my version of the car that was sitting on jack stands just behind the parts counter back in '67 when I made my first purchase at that "little race shop out at the airport" back in '67. Couldn't believe I was getting that close to a Daytona winning car. Pretty heady stuff for a seventeen year old country boy.
In some country clubs or "planned" communities this would have been a scandal in the '60's. But in victory lane for the '67 Daytona 500 it made perfect sense.
Victory Lanes are reserved for racers, and winning racers at that, and that describes Mario Andretti to a "T". Yeah, I know, Ford's "T" didn't come along until the next year but that's another story altogether.
It wasn't the first time that Ralph Moody had put together the "yankee interloper beats the established veteran" scenario. But I think that Fred Lorenzen had to have liked it better the first time around when he was the newcomer and used Ralph's strategy to beat the old pro Curtis Turner at Darlington's '61 Rebel 300. This time it was Fred that came up second to the new guy as Andretti posted his first Grand National victory.
Little Mario became one of only two drivers to win both the Daytona 500 and the Indy 500,after winning Indy two years later, on that cool February day. A.J. Foyt became the other when he won the Daytona event in 1972 in the Wood Brothers' Mercury.
Here's my version of the car that was sitting on jack stands just behind the parts counter back in '67 when I made my first purchase at that "little race shop out at the airport" back in '67. Couldn't believe I was getting that close to a Daytona winning car. Pretty heady stuff for a seventeen year old country boy.
