Victory At Last!

High-profile drivers on the breakthrough moments that made their careers.

- A.J. BAIME

'It Was like God Had Just Spoken to Me'

MARIO ANDRETTI, 1963

"MARIO ANDRETTI, you have just hit the big time!" The shrill voice came piping through the loudspeaker at the small-town dirt track in Hatfield, Pennsylvania. The announcer was, unmistakably, Chris Economaki, the "dean of motorsports journalism." Mario Andretti had just won a feature race, and he was still in the car on the cool-down lap when he heard Economaki's plaudit from above. "It was like God had just spoken to me," Andretti says, looking back on that 1963 Labor Day weekend victory.

But it wasn't just one win that day. Andretti accomplished something that had never been done and likely hasn't been replicated.

The day began with a heat and a match race 30 miles from Hatfield in Flemington, New Jersey. Twenty-three-year-old Mario had been in the U.S. for only eight years, having spent most of his childhood in Italy. His family had lost almost everything in World War II and come to America penniless. Andretti was already Ferrari mad by the time he got to this country and was determined to make it on the American racing scene. He started out in three-quarter midgets and won a lot, earning a ride in 1963 in the American Racing Drivers Club series (ARDC), which ran up and down the East Coast. Brothers Bill and Ed Mataka of Maplewood, New Jersey, owned the No. 33 car Andretti drove. It was Offenhauser-powered and bright yellow with the sponsor logo "Jersey Speed & Marine" painted on the nose.

"I won that first match race and the feature in Flemington," Andretti recalls. On those tracks, in those days, it was ten-tenths all the way. "Every lap was like a qualifying lap," he says. "It takes a lot out of you."