Meet the man who gave Mario Andretti his first full-time F1 ride

By 1975, Mario Andretti was already a star. He was a four-time champion in American open-wheel racing, he had won the Indy 500, and he’d already taken a Grand Prix victory with the iconic Scuderia Ferrari. 

And yet it wasn’t until 1975 that he actually, finally committed to racing full-time in Formula 1 — and his decision to do so comes down in large part to a man named Parnelli Jones.

Andretti: Parnelli offered “the opportunity of the moment”

For all of his success in American open-wheel, Mario Andretti was still hesitant to commit to Formula 1 on a full-time basis in the early to mid-1970s — and he had a good reason why.

“The bottom line is, I had to look at the financial aspect,” Andretti said in an episode of motorsport history podcast Deadly Passions, Terrible Joys.

“In those days, [F1] didn’t compare with what we could make in America.”

In the 1970s, F1 prize money was largely determined by the individual race track, and purses weren’t massive. In fact, one of the reasons why Watkins Glen became such a beloved home of Formula 1 was simply because the track generally offered the largest financial awards of the year.

Watkins Glen adopted a mindset that was prime in American racing.

Outside of his racing career, Mario Andretti was also starting a family — and Andretti wanted to guarantee his wife and young children would be able to sustain a comfortable life, even without him.

“I had to be thinking about my family,” he said of his finances. “Even in the years of me coming through sprint cars, I lost my closest friends.

“My wife, she never made me feel guilty [about] doing something that could leave her with young kids; it was just a challenging situation, because we’d seen what had happened to some of our friends.”

Just to illustrate how dire the situation could be, Andretti had turned down rides with Lotus and Ferrari in Formula 1; even though signing with those teams as a young man would have likely set him up extremely well for a formidable racing career in the future, he didn’t want to risk doing something that could eventually do harm to his family.

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But Andretti had an in: Parnelli Jones.

Jones was a former racing driver who had gone on to create his own race team, Vel’s Parnelli Jones Racing. In 1970 and 1971, the team had taken Indy 500 victories, and it had also taken the USAC National Championships in 1970, 1971, and 1972.

In 1974, Vel’s Parnelli Jones Racing was fielding Mario Andretti, and it was Andretti who suggested, “We’ve got to go to Formula 1.”

The team entered two F1 races at the end of 1974 as a testing of the waters before it committed to joining the series full-time in 1975 with its own chassis, called a VPJ4.

It was, unfortunately, not a fruitful operation. At the end of 1974, Firestone killed its partnership with the team, which left Vel’s Parnelli Jones Racing operating on a shoestring. The team secured a best finish of fourth place in the 1975 Swedish Grand Prix, and without a title sponsor, it killed the F1 operation just three races into 1976.

“I was devastated,” Andretti recalled of the team’s decision to end its F1 program. “They never consulted with me. It was not done very well.”

However, the friendship between Andretti and Jones was eventually repaired. Andretti joined Colin Chapman’s Lotus team in 1976, helping revive a team that had been struggling. Meanwhile, Jones was helping Cosworth develop a turbocharged version of the outfit’s DFV V8 Formula 1 engine. That project eventually turned into the Cosworth DFX, an engine that won every Indy 500 between 1978 and 1987.

Today, we pay our respects to Parnelli Jones, who was born on this day in 1933. Without him, we may never have crowned Mario Andretti a World Champion.

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