Racing Career
Aldo and Mario rebuilt a 1948 Hudson Hornet into a stock car in 1959, and began racing it. They flipped a coin to see who would race in the first race. Aldo won the coin toss, the heat race and the feature. They each had two wins after the first four weeks. Aldo fractured his skull in a serious crash near the end of the season. He recovered from his coma, and he returned the following season.
Aldo continued racing on the USAC and IMCA circuits, but in 1969 Aldo suffered severe damage to his face after crashing into a fence and quit racing. His face had 14 fractures to his facial bones. Mario described the accident in his book What's it like out there: "Aldo continued racing until August 17, 1969, when he had an accident, which was not his fault, in an IMCA sprint race at Des Moines, Iowa. He was driving a sprint car that I had bought for him."
Read more about this topic: Aldo Andretti
Famous quotes containing the words racing and/or career:
“Upscale people are fixated with food simply because they are now able to eat so much of it without getting fat, and the reason they don’t get fat is that they maintain a profligate level of calorie expenditure. The very same people whose evenings begin with melted goat’s cheese ... get up at dawn to run, break for a mid-morning aerobics class, and watch the evening news while racing on a stationary bicycle.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)