'To hell with it... I'll beat Steve McQueen': Mario Andretti's motivation to win at Sebring

America’s oldest sports car race takes place at Sebring in central Florida next week, starting at 10.40am US east coast time when more than 50 cars are due to take the start. The 12-hour race on the bumpy old airfield circuit was first run in 1952 and was a World Sportscar Championship race for 20 years from 1953-72.

Sebring has always attracted big fields. Fifty years ago no fewer than 65 cars started the race with 43 of them classified as finishers. Sebring was amid its world championship heyday at the time and 1965 was particularly memorable because it was the year Jim Hall and his Chaparral broke Ferrari’s domination of the race.

“My eyes were sunk in my head about an inch. I was really spent”

Between 1956-72 factory Ferraris won Sebring nine times and from 1956-64 Enzo’s cars were beaten only twice – by Maserati in 1957 and Porsche in 1960. But in 1965 Jim Hall and Hap Sharp led most of the way to score a resounding win aboard Hall’s Chaparral 2A-Chevy. It was the first American car to win at Sebring since John Fitch and Phil Walters drove one of Briggs Cunningham’s C4Rs to win in 1953.

Everyone was amazed at the Chaparral’s speed in ’65 but few people expected the car to last 12 hours. In qualifying Hall broke the track record by nine seconds and the fastest Ferrari was 12 seconds slower! An early rainstorm wreaked havoc on some of the field with cars spinning everywhere, but this was long before the likes of full course yellows and pace cars, so the race carried on uninterrupted.

Eventually, Hall and Sharp won by four laps from a Ford GT40 driven by Bruce McLaren and Ken Miles. The first Ferrari to finish was David Piper’s third-place 275LM co-driven by Tony Maggs.

The following year Ken Miles and Lloyd Ruby drove Carroll Shelby’s open top Ford X-1 to win, leading a Ford 1-2-3 sweep. Ford won again in 1967 as Mario Andretti and Bruce McLaren successfully debuted the new Ford MkIV. Andretti and McLaren completed a couple of 24-hour simulation runs at Daytona prior to the race and the new car ran faultlessly at Sebring.

Andretti and McLaren led almost all the way, beating team-mates AJ Foyt and Lloyd Ruby by 12 laps after Jim Hall and Mike Spence’s winged Chaparral 2F blew its engine. It was hot and windy at Sebring in ‘67 and the wind jammed the winning Ford’s air intakes with paper and debris, turning the car into an oven.

“It was so hot in that car that between stints I spent half the time in the trailer with the shower trickling over my head,” Mario recalls. “That was probably the most physical race I had in my life. If you look at some of the photos in victory lane my eyes were sunk in my head about an inch. I was really spent.”

In 1968 Porsche finished 1-2 with a pair of 907s driven by Jo Siffert and Hans Herrmann and Vic Elford and Jochen Neerpasch, but Ford won again in ’69 with one of John Wyer’s GT40s driven by Jacky Ickx and Jackie Oliver. Ferrari bounced back in 1970 as Andretti scored one of his most memorable wins after his Ferrari 512S broke and he took over the sister car of Ignazio Giunti and Nino Vaccarella.

Andretti qualified his Ferrari on the pole and after an early battle with the other leading Ferraris and Porsche 917s, Mario and co-driver Arturo Merzario took control of the race. After 11 hours they enjoyed a massive 13-lap lead only to have their gearbox fail. Andretti was tired and deeply disappointed but Ferrari team manager Mauro Forghieri asked him to take over the remaining 512S, a closed coupé driven by Vaccarella and Giunti that was running third behind a pair of Porsches.