"I turned out to be the experimental boy": When Mario Andretti defied sabotage to win the Daytona 500

Former F1 and IndyCar driver Mario Andretti won the Daytona 500 in his second start in 1967. Driving Holman Moody's No. 11 Ford, he secured the win despite his team apparently trying to hold him back.

Andretti was a rising star in racing but an outsider in NASCAR. He joined Ford’s Holman-Moody team with driver Fred Lorenzen in 1967 and made his second attempt at the Daytona 500 the following year. During a February 2017 interview, Andretti looked back on the days leading up to the 'Great American Race' and revealed that his team didn’t give him a fair shot.

"I just turned out to be the experimental boy there...being able to be alongside Fred Lorenzen, even though he wasn't volunteering any help at all…Which was fine. I was just the new boy on the block there," Andretti said (via roadandtrack.com).

Andretti shared that the team, owned by John Holman and Ralph Moody, gave him a weaker engine for qualifying and he had to convince Ford for a stronger engine for the race.

"We got the car working pretty darn good, but we did not have the engines that some of the other guys had. That was a bit of a struggle for me … to finally get what I deserved, I think. I had to qualify … with the motor that was down 400 revs, and that was based on the gear I was running...I qualified with a really low spoiler to try to get some speed out of it. But lo and behold, I had to race with it. And that is what really, that was a little bit of an issue," Mario Andretti said.

Andretti added that during the final pit stop, his crew purposely delayed him so Lorenzen could take the lead. However, the Montona, Istria native led 112 out of 200 laps in the final stage and with just a few laps to go, he built a 22-second lead to defeat Lorenzen.

Andretti became the first foreign-born driver to win a NASCAR Cup Series race that year.

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"They wanted Lorenzen to win, not me" - Mario Andretti on 1967 Daytona 500 win

Mario Andretti debuted in IndyCar in 1964 and won four National Championships. He moved to the U.S. in 1955 and started racing on dirt tracks. The 84-year-old competed in 14 races over four years in NASCAR. After his 1967 Daytona 500 win, he stayed part-time at Holman-Moody till 1969.

"I'm sure not everyone was happy with it, including Ford; they wanted Lorenzen to win, not me, because it was a one-off race for me," Mario Andretti said.

Andretti moved to F1 in 1968, where competed for 14 years, and won the 1978 championship with Lotus.