Over the past few months I've enjoyed myself
helping Adam Friedman's Traveling Light Media company produce an A&E Biography
about Mario Andretti
source: cart.com The one-hour documentary will be televised late in the winter months and we've been interviewing many people who know Mario well including his brother Aldo, wife DeeAnn, sons Michael and Jeff, and daughter Barbie. The goal has been to try to define Mario to the wider world, which is largely uninterested in racing, and to examine and portray the man behind the icon and his life as a parent and family man. We've also been talking to racing people like Jim McGee, Carl Haas and Andy Granatelli and this past weekend at the Autosport Awards in London I was able to conduct short interviews with Cristiano da Matta, Gil de Ferran and Dario Franchitti as well as my colleague Nigel Roebuck who covered Andretti's F1 exploits and wrote a book about his world championship year. Robin Miller has helped with some of the interviews and, of course, we've interviewed Robin as well because he has more experience covering American open-wheel racing than any living man and can therefore put Mario the race driver into perspective better than anyone else. Robin's also trying to interview A.J. Foyt about Mario, so let's keep our fingers crossed that we can get that in the can. A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of interviewing Dan Gurney and Parnelli Jones, two racing greats who were happy to talk at length about Mario. We conducted the interview with Dan in the museum at All-American Racers where three different Eagle CART cars are on display alongside one of the all-conquering AAR Toyota GTP cars. We interviewed Parnelli the following evening at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles where Dan was the guest of honor at a very pleasant Riverside Raceway Reunion. The complete article at cart.com
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