Andretti and Ickx remember their time as Ferrari team-mates

“It really was an amateur way to drive. To drive for Ferrari was not a matter of money – racing was not a matter of money! Sponsorship was only just arriving, and although we were called professionals, it was an amateur world in a way.

“I was 22 when I met Ferrari – and it was impressive to drive for him at that age! A lot of emotion. Now, looking back, and having heard so many things drivers have said about Ferrari, I can only say that I was always treated very well by him. Often you hear that he put one driver against another, but I never felt that. I drove for him for five years, and I’m one of the very few who left, and went back again. After I left finally, at the end of ’73, I went back many times to see him, and I was always welcome. I only have good memories of Ferrari, and I think he was much more sensitive than people believe. I think he really cared about the people who drove for him – but he also knew how dangerous it was, and maybe he tried to stay a little bit away for that reason, so as not to suffer…”

Perhaps Ferrari mellowed as he got older. Over time many a driver, notably Juan Manuel Fangio and Phil Hill, has told me of the political machinations endemic in Maranello in earlier days. Tales of Enzo’s ruthlessness abounded, and I related one told to me by Peter Ustinov: “Peter Collins once told me the most terrifying story about the Commendatore. He was with him in the office, and the phone went. Ferrari picked it up, and said, ‘Pronto! Ferrari!’ Then he listened, and he became pale. ‘Non e possibile… Castellotti… Castellotti morto…’ A slight pause. ‘E la macchina?’”

“From my experience, that’s hard to believe,” said Ickx.

“Well,” Andretti murmured, “at least he was concerned about Castellotti first!”

In point of fact, Mario’s first Ferrari drive was not in a factory car, but in Luigi Chinetti’s North American Racing Team 365P2 at the Daytona 24 Hours in 1966.

“I drove with Pedro Rodríguez, and I think we finished fourth, behind three Fords. Actually, what I remember most about it is driving back to the hotel in Ormond Beach afterwards – along the beach.

“I says, ‘Pedro, you stink!’ and he says, ‘Well, you stink too!’” Mario Andretti

“In those days you had one driving uniform – and you drove the whole race in it, right? Well, we’re in this Ford Fairlane rental car, and I says, ‘Pedro, you stink!’ and he says, ‘Well, you stink too!’ The windows are open, and I’m driving right next to the surf, and I’m going along pretty good, trying to get spray into the car, and all of a sudden I’m just suckered into the sea – I mean, water up to here! I’m trying to back it up, wheels spinning like crazy – couldn’t get out. No money on me, so now I have to ask people for a dime so I can call up Hertz! When I get through to them, I says, ‘Your damn car! I’m tooling along on the beach, two miles an hour, and all of a sudden it stops, and now we’re up to here in water…’ And they’re going, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah…’”

They’re very different, these two. Friends, yes, and team-mates long ago, but so different in attitude to the job they did. At 14 Mario was taken by his uncle to Monza, and was ever after obsessed with becoming a racing driver. At the same sort of age Jacky went to Spa with his father, and was so bored that he asked to be taken home!

“Maybe I have always been a little bit unusual,” he smiled. “The truth is that I never wanted to be a racing driver – never thought about it. Yes, I went to Spa, but I absolutely was not interested! Because my father was a motoring journalist, I remember seeing Stirling and Fangio and others at home in Brussels, for a cocktail party before a race at Francorchamps. Even that didn’t impress me!”

While Andretti faced strenuous parental opposition – particularly from his father – to pursuing a career in motor racing, Ickx was rather luckier.

“Eventually,” he said, “my father came to hate racing, because he had seen so many friends… going away that it was hurting him. On the other hand, my parents, although they lost friends in racing, were not against competition. My father knew I was not good at school, but, rather than being punished for being bad, I was given a trials motorcycle, and at 16 for the first time in my life I had people saying, ‘Well done’. What is it, destiny? It’s the luck of being in the right place at the right time, with the right people – and making the right choice…”

Ickx says that the World Championship was never important to him, that winning races was always the priority. He could well have taken the title in 1970, but rejoices that he did not, for Jochen Rindt, his only rival, was killed in qualifying for the Italian Grand Prix.

Can a racing driver ever have been in a more invidious position? On the one hand, Ickx was employed by Ferrari, and obligated to win if possible; on the other, who would have wished to defeat a man no longer there?

Following Rindt’s death, there were four Grands Prix to be run. At Monza, the next day, Jacky retired, but victory in the remaining three would take him past Jochen’s total, and by that stage of the season the Ferrari 312B had become emphatically the car to have. Ickx duly won at St Jovite, then took pole position at Watkins Glen – but in the race was delayed by a fuel leak, and finished only fourth.

“Did you ever speak to McQueen?” I asked.

“No,” said Mario. “Why would I?”

In 1972 Ickx scored the last GP win of his career, and did it emphatically, at his beloved Nürburgring. And that year, too, he and Andretti dominated the sports car scene, taking the sublime 312PB to victory at Daytona, Sebring, Brands Hatch and Watkins Glen.

“I loved driving with Jacky,” said Mario. “First, we got along so well, and physically we were very similar: we did a perfect compromise in the seat position – he gave up a little, I gave up a little. Second, he always let me qualify! When it came time to really go, he could go as quick as anybody – and safely, in that he’d always bring the car back. He was a dream as a team-mate.”

Ickx concurs: “Driving with Mario… what could have been better? We were the same sort of size, same driving position – and same philosophy. A perfect joint venture.”

Clearly they loved those times, when the other member of the Ferrari triumvirate was Clay Regazzoni, whose memory they hold in deep affection and respect.

“Ah, Clay…” Andretti’s face said it all. “There was something about the man that made everyone smile. He was serious when he needed to be, but he was such a free spirit. I think of him, and I think, ‘God bless him’.

“I remember Monza in ’71. On Saturday we’re having lunch – and there’s Clay with a glass of red wine! This is right before qualifying! Today I guess there would be great horror at that. I’m looking at him and thinking, ‘Madonna!’ For the Italians, though, it was just normal…”

“Well, you know,” Ickx laughed, “there are plenty of doctors who say that a glass of wine doesn’t hurt – now everyone lives on yoghurt!

It was part of the training – at every lunch with Enzo Ferrari there was, OK, maybe not a bottle, but certainly a glass…”

“You know,” Mario went on, “it doesn’t follow that just because a guy’s your team-mate you want to go to dinner with him, but Clay was someone you wanted to be with – you always had to watch for the practical jokes, but he was one of those guys I just simply loved. An absolutely pure racer, through and through.”

“I never knew anyone,” said Jacky, “who enjoyed life as much as Clay. A really hard racer, but relaxed, cool – a wonderful person altogether. No envy in him, no jealousy – never tried to do anything nasty, never worked to get people ‘on his side’.

“After his accident he went through difficult times – I think for a long time he didn’t want to live. He was almost recovered, you know – I saw him walking – but then he had another operation, and… it was finished. But then he found another way to live – maybe not as he would have wished – but he seemed to enjoy it, once he’d got over the depression.”

And, of course, there was Forghieri, the Italian’s Italian. Niki Lauda, I said, once described Mauro as ‘a mad genius’, and both my lunch guests nodded in vigorous agreement.

“Absolutely,” said Andretti. “I’ll buy that. Very good in some ways, and molto casino in others! Lovely guy, but I remember overhearing him on a hallway phone in a hotel somewhere, talking to the Old Man – and of course he was blaming the drivers for everything! I thought, ‘OK, so now we know…’”

“Niki was completely right,” said Ickx. “In those days you could do a good car one year, and the next year a terrible one! Forghieri’s ’70 car, the 312B, was fine – but the B2 was so bad that at Watkins Glen I went back to the old car, which had been taken only as a spare. It wasn’t easy because no engineer wants to admit that his car isn’t as good as his previous one – the temptation is always to blame the drivers. Mauro was a good man – but don’t forget that we all have egos! Maybe my ego is totally reduced today, but at the time it was not…

“Think about Forghieri, and you have to think about wings – the small wing on Amon’s car at Spa in ’68 was the first in F1. And look at the fins they have today, from the back of the cockpit to the wing – you can find that on a Ferrari 40 years ago!”

At the end of 1973 Ickx left Ferrari for Lotus, and it was with Colin Chapman’s team, too, that Andretti later struck gold in F1, winning the World Championship in 1978.

For Mario, though, it wasn’t quite the end of the Maranello saga. By 1982 he had put F1 behind him, and gone back to his American racing roots, but late in the year there came a call from the Old Man. In a season which had seen the death of Gilles Villeneuve and grievous injuries to Didier Pironi, Ferrari had need of a team-mate for Patrick Tambay at Monza.

“I’d turned down a full-time Ferrari drive at the end of ’71,” said Mario, “and never regretted it, from a results standpoint, because although I loved the 312PB sports cars of that period, the ’71 and ’72 F1 cars were usually diabolical! Then, at the end of ’77, the Old Man asked me back, but if I’d left Lotus, I probably would have given up the World Championship.

“I never did drive full-time for Ferrari, but at least I was with them enough to get the flavour of it – and to be called back for Monza in ’82 was really something. I knew I was taking a big risk, because I’d never driven a turbo F1 car, but everything worked out.

“The weekend before the race I took an overnight flight to Milan, and the idea was that on the first day I was just going to get familiarised, make sure the seat was good and so on, but I started running at Fiorano, and did 87 laps. Forghieri kept saying, ‘D’you want to stop?’, and I said, ‘No, let’s keep going – I’m sort of in the zone’. At the end of the day we set a new track record, and I said, ‘I’m ready’.”

So he was: the following weekend, amid the most emotional scenes I have ever seen at Monza, he put the car on pole.

“When I think of Ferrari,” said Andretti, “I remember Daytona in ’72, where Jacky and I shared a 312PB. It was a six-hour race that year, and on the first lap the car went onto 11 cylinders – and we still won! It ran all day like that, and survived. Only a Ferrari…”