History Steve McQueen’s Command Center

I had no idea about this... Wonder what the story was...

 

I've known Mario Andretti since I was five years old. He was a friend of my dad's, and through that relationship I've been lucky enough to pick his brain every now and then. This past week I got him talking about Steve McQueen and the 1970 Sebring race, and what came out was something a little uglier and more honest than the official record tends to let on.

That race was soaked in resentment from the start. Porsche had shown up with the 917, a machine so brutally fast it made the compe***ion genuinely uncomfortable. Ferrari rolled in with their factory teams and the 512S, carrying that particular confidence that only Italians can pull off without looking ridiculous. But in 1970, they had a unique fear. They were rightfully, genuinely, bowel-loosening scared of the 917. But there were also a couple of Porsche 908s skulking around the grid, small and nimble and deeply insulting to Ferrari's sense of powertrain importance. The idea of losing to those little ******* cars was simply not something the Ferrari ego could metabolize.

And behind the wheel of one of those privately owned 908s was Steve McQueen, paired with teammate Peter Revson. And this is where the resentment got personal. McQueen had arrived the way famous people do, trailing money and publicity and borrowed credibility. He'd taken a seat from someone who'd earned it. Worse, he was pulling all the attention away from his own teammate, a man who was turning laps nearly three full seconds faster per lap. In racing, that's not a gap. That's a verdict.

When Mario's Ferrari retired with mechanical issues, any reasonable man with a race the following day would have walked to the paddock, poured himself a drink, and headed for the airport as soon as the gl*** was empty.

"I had another race the next day and no intention of getting into another car," Mario told me.

But resentment is a hell of a motivator. Mario climbed into another team car buried deep in the pack and drove it like a man with something personal to settle. He hauled the thing all the way to the front, eventually p***ing an exhausted Peter Revson and winning the race, saving Ferrari from the embarr***ment of losing to a 908 that was partly being driven by a movie star.

After the race, once the compe***ive fire had cooled, the picture got a little clearer.

Steve McQueen was not a professional racing driver. Had Revson been paired with another pro, that 908 wins Sebring in 1970. McQueen cost Porsche that race, and no honest person would argue otherwise.

And yet, something else was also true.

"He was actually pretty predictable on track. He didn't cause any accidents and he was talented for an amateur. Once the race was over and all the compe***ive juices stopped flowing, you could see that more clearly. Maybe he didn't deserve a seat in that race, but he owned the car and you didn't hear Revson complaining about his paycheck. By the end of the 1970s, there wasn't a professional alive that didn't appreciate what Steve McQueen did for our profession."

From racing people, that's a genuinely generous thing to say.

What it comes down to is this: Steve McQueen was a car guy who had done well enough in life to buy himself a dream and race it at the highest level he could reach. Whether he truly belonged there is debatable. But to professionals like Mario Andretti, that debate matters less than you'd think.

The man showed up, ran the race, and didn't fold when things got serious. In the long history of wealthy people buying their way into places they didn't quite earn, that counts for something real.

 

Nice write up.....

"What it comes down to is this: Steve McQueen was a car guy who had done well enough in life to buy himself a dream and race it at the highest level he could reach. Whether he truly belonged there is debatable. But to professionals like Mario Andretti, that debate matters less than you'd think."

" Buy himself a dream"
We all would, if we could.

 

Racing has gotten exponentially safer since Sebring 1970, but one thing hasn't changed: if you have enough money, you can still buy your way to the top.

It was murkier back then. The lines between gentleman driver and professional were blurry enough that a man like McQueen could find a credible seat without the whole world debating whether he deserved it. These days the hierarchy is unambiguous. Formula 1 sits at the top, full stop. The most advanced cars on the planet, driven by people who have spent their entire lives earning the right to be there. I know a thing or two about that journey.

And yet. Lance Stroll has an F1 seat because his father bought a team. Without that transaction, Lance is almost certainly not on the grid. Does that mean he has no talent? Not at all. In wet conditions he's genuinely one of the better drivers out there.

But so is the math. Without the money, the seat doesn't exist for him. And somewhere out there is a driver who spent years grinding through the junior formulas with the results and the pace to deserve that seat, and never got it because the door was already closed.

McQueen at least showed up as an openly amateur in a field that had room for amateurs. Stroll arrived at the pinnacle of the sport through a door that most people don't even know exists.

The resentment Mario felt at Sebring in 1970 makes a lot more sense when you realize the sport never figured out how to close that door. It just got more expensive to walk through it.

 

Top Fuel and NASCAR are not top tier racing leagues. Different guardrails from the others.... and so, far different politics.

Hell, I'm not convinced NASCAR is even real from a compe***ive standpoint.

Lewis Hamilton. That dude had every single brick stacked against him and an army of people that didn't want him to have success. But his talent was so great, none of it mattered.

Scott McLaughlin. He didn't come from poverty, but he came from New Zealand... Zero connections in the sport growing up. Talent got him everything.

Ben Keating. Sort of a hybrid. Got rich off of smarts and hard work. Used that money to build his own endurance team. He's now probably a****st the top 10 talented endurance racers of all time.

 

In a way, the Hamilton conversation supports your point rather than contradicts it. There are plenty of rags to riches stories in the history of racing, but genuine ones in the modern era are rare enough that most casual fans can only name one.

By almost any measure Lewis is the greatest driver who ever lived. Seven world championships, more race wins than anyone in history... All in a period built for parity and driver matchups rather than mechanical ones. Reasonable people debate Schumacher or Senna, but Hamilton belongs in that conversation without qualification. Top two or three, at absolute minimum.

But he's the exception, not the rule. For every Lewis there are probably thousands of drivers who never got the call, not because they weren't fast enough, but because they had the wrong last name or a bank account that couldn't push them along.

Strip the influence of money out of motorsport and you'd almost certainly get a faster, more honest grid. But that's true of any sport, any industry, any room where talent and capital are forced to share the same table.

 

I'm in the mood to write again, so you guys are ****ed...

I grew up in a racing family. I was part of the nepotism, and I knew it, even if I didn't have the word for it at the time.

Because of my father's relationships in the sport, I was set up with a kart team at 12 or 13 years of age. And because I'd been around racing since birth, I arrived with something most kids didn't have at that age: a genuine understanding of what it took to win. So I won. A lot. Most of the time by laps rather than seconds, which at that age in that world felt like a pretty clear statement about where I stood.

By sixteen I was quietly confident I was the best driver in the country for my age, kart or otherwise. So were a lot of the people my father knew. At 17, VDS Racing sponsored me to attend racing school in M****ille, France. I did well enough there to land in an F3 car, racing against both kids and adults from similar backgrounds, with one significant difference: they had all started karting by age 5... at least...

I recognized that gap almost immediately. Not everyone did.

From there I became a development driver for Peugeot, and then Benetton-Ford in F1. And that's where the difference stopped being subtle and became extremely, uncomfortably obvious. Guys with half my supposed pedigree were posting lap times that made mine look apologetic. When I pulled their track data I kept running into the same impossible numbers.

How is he braking that late into that corner? How is he already back on the throttle? Why didn't he scrub any speed there?

The answer, every time, was the same. They had started earlier, ac***ulated more experience, and were simply more talented. I had gotten as far as I did because of my father's connections and the fact that I was American, which in European motorsport at that time was still enough of a novelty to open a few doors that talent alone might not have.

Nepotism got me through the door. What was on the other side of it is something I'm still processing more than thirty years later.

The talent at that level isn't just better. It's a different category of thing entirely, something that doesn't fully compute when you're standing next to it with a stopwatch and your own data to compare. I saw it firsthand and I still can't entirely wrap my head around it.

 

Repe***ion can definitely lead to success.
Not always, but certainly can lead to the top of many performance pyramids.

 

This is all opinion, but...

Schumacher would stop at nothing. He lived permanently on the border of driving dirty, and he knew exactly what that did to the people around him. It created a kind of ambient fear on the track that he used as a weapon as deliberately as any overtaking move. People remember him as aggressive because of that, but watch the footage closely and what you actually see is a surgeon. Precise, controlled, almost clinical.

Senna was something else completely. Forget smooth. He stabbed the throttle and jerked the wheel and somehow bent the car to his will through what looked like barely controlled violence. He was a genius in the truest sense of the word, the kind of driver you couldn't take your eyes off because you genuinely weren't sure what he was about to do next. He also happened to be my lead instructor at racing school...

Hamilton operates in a different register entirely. Watch his onboard footage and go straight to his hands. They're slow. Unhurried. Almost lazy looking.... His feet match it. The whole picture is one of almost unsettling calm. If I had to pick one word for him it would be fearless, not in the reckless sense but in the deepest possible sense. The best late braker in the history of the sport... And he can carry speed through high speed corners like a man who has genuinely made peace with the consequences. In my mind, he's the best to ever do it.

 

Jesus Christ... that is one of the most offensive things I've ever heard.