Did I just witness History?

pwd72s

pwd72s

recreational banger
Silver Member
Just watched Tony Stewart win his first top fuel race over Ashley Force. This means he's won races at the top level of Indy Car, NASCAR, and NHRA. Sort of a grand slam.

Is he the only one to have done this?

Hold on, I'm getting to pool. Tony Stewart & Shannon Daulton are good friends. Evidently, Tony no slouch on a pool table as well. Race drivers are among the elites at hand-eye stuff...so are MMA guys like Joe Rogan, who also plays pool well for an amateur.

I'm thinking it would be a hell of a Rogan Experience episode if he & Tony Stewart played while Joe interviewed Tony...kind of like two friends talking as they played.
 
JPB2 said:
I’m not a motor sports guy. But I think Mario Andretti winning a Formula 1 title and multiple races to go with NASCAR and Indy Racing has to rank higher than winning a drag race. But, it’s a cool feat and he likes pool so…
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Mario was a monster on dirt too. Which brings me to mention there are some truly awesome old races on youtube. Mario, Foyt, Rutherford, many more. The same names that we watched at Indy were running forty to a hundred miles on dirt a few weeks before or after. Tracks shown include Ascot and the Milwaukee Mile, recently asphalted in one race unfortunately. Still an awesome track, long and skinny.

A good many races from midgets to sprints and supers, many without cages! I remember drivers fighting roll bars, said they would make a car too top heavy! Wanted to run without them.

Mario was a hero of mine, a good Irish lad. AJ was another. AJ never ran F1 best I recall but he ran everything with wheels in the USA.

Hu
 
pwd72s said:
AJ co drove in a Corvette team at Lemans, a class win.
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Not surprised he could but I didn't know that.

A bit off topic but a bit of an AJ story. I think most know AJ had a hot temper. I have always wondered about the explosion after this. A group of dirt trackers from around Alexandria Louisiana decided they would all go to a big auto show in Dallas. Just outside the front door a hot rod owned by AJ was on display. Chromed, beautiful, I think a classic T-bucket. Small block Chevy so the front end wasn't real heavy. Randy B got to thinking how nice AJ's front axle would look on his hundred inch dirt car. Vile handling beasts by the way. I built one but those things should never have existed. Anyway, right there with thousands of people nearby and people walking by constantly, four of them lifted the front end and they stole the axle, wheels, and tires. Can you imagine Foyt's disbelief and anger?

I questioned the suitability of a dropped front axle on the dirt car but he did win some races with it and yeah, it did look bitch'n!

Hu
 
JPB2 said:
I’m not a motor sports guy. But I think Mario Andretti winning a Formula 1 title and multiple races to go with NASCAR and Indy Racing has to rank higher than winning a drag race. But, it’s a cool feat and he likes pool so…
Click to expand...
I had lunch with Mario Andretti at a Lambo event in 2000 at the zoo in Santa Barbara , he was a super nice guy. My friend who ran the event hired him for the event. Was interesting listening to him talk about his wineries. I actully forgot about this until reading this thread. Cool memories

Fatboy😃
 
ShootingArts said:
Not surprised he could but I didn't know that.

A bit off topic but a bit of an AJ story. I think most know AJ had a hot temper. I have always wondered about the explosion after this. A group of dirt trackers from around Alexandria Louisiana decided they would all go to a big auto show in Dallas. Just outside the front door a hot rod owned by AJ was on display. Chromed, beautiful, I think a classic T-bucket. Small block Chevy so the front end wasn't real heavy. Randy B got to thinking how nice AJ's front axle would look on his hundred inch dirt car. Vile handling beasts by the way. I built one but those things should never have existed. Anyway, right there with thousands of people nearby and people walking by constantly, four of them lifted the front end and they stole the axle, wheels, and tires. Can you imagine Foyt's disbelief and anger?

I questioned the suitability of a dropped front axle on the dirt car but he did win some races with it and yeah, it did look bitch'n!

Hu
Click to expand...
🤦🏻‍♂️
 
JPB2 said:
I’m not a motor sports guy. But I think Mario Andretti winning a Formula 1 title and multiple races to go with NASCAR and Indy Racing has to rank higher than winning a drag race. But, it’s a cool feat and he likes pool so…
Click to expand...
My favorite was Parnelli Jones. He drove every kind of race car from Baja to Trans Am to Midgets to Sprint cars to Group Seven to Indy cars, and won at all of them. The most aggressive driver ever!
 
jay helfert said:
My favorite was Parnelli Jones. He drove every kind of race car from Baja to Trans Am to Midgets to Sprint cars to Group Seven to Indy cars, and won at all of them. The most aggressive driver ever!
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Rufus Parnelli Jones! He took one look at the Granitelli turbine car, one of the most sophisticated Indy cars ever built and named it Clyde.

He was an animal and nowhere more aggressive than in the Baja. His fully custom vehicle with a Bronco body on it was sponsored by Olympia beer. A favorite of mine was the spotter airplane flying at 130MPH or thereabouts reporting from the desert dirt section that he had just been passed by a bouncing beer can!

In the years of my youth I might not see any other sports event but the Indianapolis 500 was sacred. I watched it every year. The drivers mentioned here including Parnelli and many more were all legends to me. The rear engine cars are cool but I liked the old cars with an occasional shorter wheelbase dirt car still making the show. Awesome drivers and cars. I dreamed of owning one of the old champ cars asphalt or dirt. The new ones are wonderful pieces of technology but they don't speed my pulse like the old cars with the drivers sitting upright over the driveshaft. The few sprint cars I drove I always inspected carefully. A friend was driving a sprinter with open driveshaft when a u-joint broke. He was laid up for a few weeks, that driveshaft beat hell out of him between the legs, narrowly missing taking off the family jewels!

Hu
 
ShootingArts said:
Rufus Parnelli Jones! He took one look at the Granitelli turbine car, one of the most sophisticated Indy cars ever built and named it Clyde.

He was an animal and nowhere more aggressive than in the Baja. His fully custom vehicle with a Bronco body on it was sponsored by Olympia beer. A favorite of mine was the spotter airplane flying at 130MPH or thereabouts reporting from the desert dirt section that he had just been passed by a bouncing beer can!

In the years of my youth I might not see any other sports event but the Indianapolis 500 was sacred. I watched it every year. The drivers mentioned here including Parnelli and many more were all legends to me. The rear engine cars are cool but I liked the old cars with an occasional shorter wheelbase dirt car still making the show. Awesome drivers and cars. I dreamed of owning one of the old champ cars asphalt or dirt. The new ones are wonderful pieces of technology but they don't speed my pulse like the old cars with the drivers sitting upright over the driveshaft. The few sprint cars I drove I always inspected carefully. A friend was driving a sprinter with open driveshaft when a u-joint broke. He was laid up for a few weeks, that driveshaft beat hell out of him between the legs, narrowly missing taking off the family jewels!

Hu
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My brother and I were racers as young men, moving up from go karts to dirt bikes to sports cars. It all came to an end when my brother bought it on the back straightaway at Phoenix International. I have to think my life would have gone in a different direction if he had survived. We both loved racing. After that all I had left was pool.
 
IMG_0675.jpeg

This is Mario’s twin brother Aldo, who has since passed.
 
jay helfert said:
My brother and I were racers as young men, moving up from go karts to dirt bikes to sports cars. It all came to an end when my brother bought it on the back straightaway at Phoenix International. I have to think my life would have gone in a different direction if he had survived. We both loved racing. After that all I had left was pool.
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I remember you talking about your brother before. I lost mine at about the same age, I was twenty, he was twenty-two. Not a racing accident, a tree and power line. That was what he did for a living for awhile but he had taken a day off work to help a friend. For about six months I cared about nothing and nothing was the same after that.

I did have fun with Rusty when he came home. My late model dirt car was pushing between 600-650HP. When I put him behind the wheel I gave him careful instructions: "You haven't ever driven, go down yonder and take a left. Come back this way and take another left." I neglected to mention that the car was set up to turn left under power, you had to make constant correction to go straight! He spun the first three times he hit the throttle.(grin) The joke was on me, somebody else had a nondriver in their car in practice and he hit my right front square centered in a cut down Peterbuilt bumper! Hair lipped my suspension and bent the spindle badly when I was passing everything on the track that night including the fastest car in that part of the country. I got it running, middle of the pack damnit!

I was running the next night. The spindle was special and I didn't have a spare. I heated it and bent it as straight as possible then welded a big assed gusset in to make it stronger than new. Had a bunch of built in camber now. I raced it like that the rest of the year and it ran like a scalded dog. I miss racing, I was building a sprint car when having a family put the final death knell in my racing. I didn't want to take the hours away from family. Horses had came along too. Family and horses ended racing and pool. No pressure to quit either but there are only so many hours in a day.

Hu
 
Only driver that comes close in recent yrs is John Andretti. He drove: IMSA GTP cars, sprint cars on dirt, NASCAR, and NHRA top-fuel dragster. He won or finished well in all of them. Died way to young from the Big C.
 
ShootingArts said:
Mario was a monster on dirt too. Which brings me to mention there are some truly awesome old races on youtube. Mario, Foyt, Rutherford, many more. The same names that we watched at Indy were running forty to a hundred miles on dirt a few weeks before or after. Tracks shown include Ascot and the Milwaukee Mile, recently asphalted in one race unfortunately. Still an awesome track, long and skinny.

A good many races from midgets to sprints and supers, many without cages! I remember drivers fighting roll bars, said they would make a car too top heavy! Wanted to run without them.

Mario was a hero of mine, a good Irish lad. AJ was another. AJ never ran F1 best I recall but he ran everything with wheels in the USA.

Hu
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And Mario was allegedly the second best driver in the family, according to him anyways. His brother Aldo was supposedly faster but a bad wreck early on prematurely ended his driving career.
 
fastone371 said:
And Mario was allegedly the second best driver in the family, according to him anyways. His brother Aldo was supposedly faster but a bad wreck early on prematurely ended his driving career.
Click to expand...

Hard to say from family opinions but some drivers are like pool shooters that can hit the cue ball a little bit further from center reliably. Unfortunately for racers if you are really good finding the edge all the time something inevitably happens. Your fault, another driver's fault, mechanical, act of God, who knows? "Stuff" happens sometimes.

The story is the Granatellis pulled Vincent, the youngest brother, out of cars for just that reason. He was too good and too brave, just a matter of time.

While not everyone agreed I considered my driving style pretty conservative. I herded the car in the direction I wanted it to go and let it find the exact path. When somebody questioned the groove I ran I told them the truth, it wasn't me, that was where the car liked to run. If people didn't like my driving they could get the hell off the sidewalk!

Hu
 
My fave Mario story is an interview when he described his first drive in a ground-effects car. He was testing, slowly adding speed. He said he got surprised when a high-speed turn had been rained on since his last lap. He said he turned in at previous speed, fully expecting to go off track and crash violently. But with downforce, the car just turned as if it was dry. He conveyed that it opened his eyes and allowed him to accelerate his learning curve driving cars with significant downforce.

I think the guys who raced in multiple disciplines had an advantage in that they likely learned things from disparate forms of racing they could apply across the other forms. But these days, drivers are often locked into contracts that prevent them from racing in other cars or series; they don't want their drivers to be injured (or worse) and then therefore unavailable to race in their home contracted series.
 
AJ is another multi-discipline champion. Grew on USAC midgets/sprints/champ dirt cars( 159 feature wins and 13 titles) won Indy 4 times, won LeMans with Gurney, raced NASCAR(won Daytona with the Wood Bros), IMSA GTP Porsche 962's(won Sebring 12hr. in '85). Guy could drive anything.
 
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ShootingArts said:
Hard to say from family opinions but some drivers are like pool shooters that can hit the cue ball a little bit further from center reliably. Unfortunately for racers if you are really good finding the edge all the time something inevitably happens. Your fault, another driver's fault, mechanical, act of God, who knows? "Stuff" happens sometimes.

The story is the Granatellis pulled Vincent, the youngest brother, out of cars for just that reason. He was too good and too brave, just a matter of time.

While not everyone agreed I considered my driving style pretty conservative. I herded the car in the direction I wanted it to go and let it find the exact path. When somebody questioned the groove I ran I told them the truth, it wasn't me, that was where the car liked to run. If people didn't like my driving they could get the hell off the sidewalk!

Hu
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There is an Andy Granatelli book out, real good read, I read it a couple months ago.
Another excellent read about Daytona but it touches on many of the greats and how they ended up racing there.

Daytona: From the Birth of Speed to the Death of the Man in Black: Hinton, Ed: 9780446526777: Amazon.com: Books

Daytona: From the Birth of Speed to the Death of the Man in Black [Hinton, Ed] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Daytona: From the Birth of Speed to the Death of the Man in Black
www.amazon.com
 
fastone371 said:
There is an Andy Granatelli book out, real good read, I read it a couple months ago.
Another excellent read about Daytona but it touches on many of the greats and how they ended up racing there.

Daytona: From the Birth of Speed to the Death of the Man in Black: Hinton, Ed: 9780446526777: Amazon.com: Books

Daytona: From the Birth of Speed to the Death of the Man in Black [Hinton, Ed] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Daytona: From the Birth of Speed to the Death of the Man in Black
www.amazon.com
Click to expand...


I read one penned by Andy many years ago. Great read I think named "They Call Me Mr 500". The book was hilarious but managed to piss off about 90% of the racing world including JC Agaman(SP?) who they did call Mr 500! Add the mail order giant Honest Charlie and pretty much everyone mentioned in the book. It should have had a disclaimer "Inspired by actual events." Never the less, always wished Andy had written more. The book, and his true antics, were great. You know he could have been a hell of a pool hustler had he went that way.

Hu
 
ShootingArts said:
I read one penned by Andy many years ago. Great read I think named "They Call Me Mr 500". The book was hilarious but managed to piss off about 90% of the racing world including JC Agaman(SP?) who they did call Mr 500! Add the mail order giant Honest Charlie and pretty much everyone mentioned in the book. It should have had a disclaimer "Inspired by actual events." Never the less, always wished Andy had written more. The book, and his true antics, were great. You know he could have been a hell of a pool hustler had he went that way.

Hu
Click to expand...
Yeah, thats the one I was talking about, fascinating read, I couldn't remember the name.
 
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