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Want to Know How to Race at Le Mans? Ask Mario Andretti

At left in foreground, the Ford GT40 Mk IV, driven by Mario Andretti and Lucien Bianchi, before the start of the 1967 Le Mans event. The car was destroyed in a crash with Andretti driving.Credit...Rainer W. Schlegelmilch/Getty Images

Even at age 77, Mario Andretti says he would love to drive in another 24 Hours of Le Mans, especially if he could team up with his son Michael and his grandson Marco, both speedy racers in their own right.

“But now, with every year that goes by, it’s unlikely,” Mario Andretti said recently. “My son is 22 years younger than me, and he says he’s too old. I was raring to go, and he said he was too old.”

Michael Andretti, now a team owner, laughed when he heard the story.

“He is the ultimate racer,” Michael Andretti said. “It is such a competitive event that I could not really dedicate real time and effort with everything else I had going on.”

Mario Andretti has driven just about every kind of race car — midgets, sprinters, Indy cars, stock cars, Formula One cars. He has won the Daytona 500, the Indianapolis 500 and a Formula One driver’s championship, but he never conquered Le Mans. He made eight appearances there, between 1966 and 2000, the last when he was 60.

He won his class in 1995, and although he never posted an overall win, he has been in so many endurance races that he knows what it takes for drivers and teams to compete.

“It’s getting everything right,” he said. “It’s minimizing mistakes and, of course, hoping the car stays under you.”

He said there were many factors to deal with in an endurance race.

“Many of those factors can either go for you or against you,” Andretti said. “It’s a matter of really being able to stay on top of things, proper planning and being able to react to certain situations that were not predicted.”

Andretti won the Six Hours of Daytona once (it has since been stretched out to a 24-hour event) and the 12 Hours of Sebring three times. But Le Mans, he said, was unique, if just for the setting. The circuit changed very little in his 35 years there. It was a fun course to drive, a fast racetrack where “you could stretch your legs,” as he put it.

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From left, three generations of Andrettis: Marco, 30; Michael, 54; and Mario, 77. “I was raring to go, and he said he was too old,” Mario says of his son’s refusal to race at Le Mans with him.Credit...Ralph Lauer/Associated Press

“They have done a great deal to make the track much safer than what it used to be, and it is a phenomenal event,” Andretti said. “It’s got the ambience. You got the driving around, you got the Ferris wheel going at the same time, people having a ball. They go to dinner, they go on the Ferris wheel and they watch some racing, then they eat some more and watch some more racing.”

He laughed, then said, “It is really amazing what goes on there.”

Andretti said the challenge there was similar to any long-distance race.

“It’s a matter of really being able to stay on top of things, proper planning and being able to react to certain situations that were not predicted,” he said. “But there’s nothing different from any other race. Any race you go into, you plan the same way. I always say, ‘It’s not because you go to Le Mans that you do things differently than you did in the Daytona 24 Hours. Because if you did that, you’re doing something wrong somewhere else.’

“I use this analogy, this comparison: The teams that go to the Super Bowl don’t change their plays just because they’re in the Super Bowl. You do everything that you’ve done along the season.”

A majority of the races in which Andretti drove in his career were during the day and largely on a dry racetrack, but Le Mans gave him a chance to race at night and in heavy rain, often for hours. He said the rain could give some drivers an advantage.

“It wasn’t that I was looking forward to it,” he said of driving in the rain, “but once I was in it, I ended up kind of liking it because that’s where you can really gain advantages if you do it right — if you take some risks and get away with it. Visibility can be like 20 percent, and it could be daunting, no question.”

“In ’95, because of the wet conditions, I could make up so much time,” he said about the race that year in which his team finished second. “I was like a man possessed. I stayed in the car for double stints. The worst thing you can do at night, especially under wet conditions, is to change drivers. You can only stay in the car for so long, but I stayed for the maximum in the car, because I felt that I had that advantage, because I knew what to expect. A new driver, going out all of a sudden, has to go out and learn all the new things: the shut-off points and all of that, because, like I said, visibility is cut down tremendously. Those conditions actually helped a lot for us to regain and almost win that race.”

Marco, his grandson, was 8 at the time. He went on to become an IndyCar racer and finished eighth in the Indy 500 on May 28, driving for Andretti Autosport, his father’s team, which finished first with Takuma Sato.

Mario has wondered whether three generations of Andrettis could drive at Le Mans.

“The opportunity to do that with the third generation would have been awesome,” Mario Andretti said 51 years after his first race at Le Mans. “But, obviously, that is not going to happen.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 11 in The New York Times International Edition. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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