INDIANAPOLIS, Ind – Has it really been 50 years since Mario Andretti won the Indy 500 in his Ford-powered backup car?  Can it be five decades?  Yes it has, and yes it can.

Mario Andretti is unquestionably one of motorsports’ greatest treasures. Mr. Versatile; a man who drove nearly everything and raced nearly everywhere, and who several times was voted Driver of the Year. Back in 1994, Mario became a Spirit of Ford Award honoree, joining an international list of racing legends from all aspects of the sport. The Spirit of Ford Award is Ford Motor Company’s highest honor in auto racing, recognizing lifetime achievement and contribution to the industry both on and off the racetrack.

Much hoopla surrounded Nigel Mansell becoming CART champion in his rookie year (1993), but Andretti bagged the crown -- then under U.S. Auto Club sanction -- in his first full season (1965), and backed it up with a repeat in '66. And then Mario went on to become a four-time USAC/CART champion. In fact, he won a total of 52 races in Indy cars – many, including his first and last, were with Ford. And speaking of versatility, Mario won the 1967 Daytona 500 in a Holman-Moody NASCAR Ford, and in 1978, he became the Formula One World Champion, with Ford-Cosworth power.Among Mario's many accomplishments is an Indianapolis 500 victory. Yet Indy mavens, both real and self-proclaimed, have a more-curious fixation on all of the 500’s Andretti didn't win. He sat on the pole in 1966 and '67, but those races were won by others. In 1968, he finished dead last. He was awarded the race victory in 1981 via Bobby Unser's rules infraction and subsequent penalty, only to have the Borg Warner Trophy snatched from his grasp by an arbitration committee.

A sideways Kevin Cogan took him out of the 1982 event on the pace lap. Remember the "Spin and Win" duel with Danny Sullivan in 1985? Agony struck in spades when a virtually certain 1987 victory (from the pole) faltered mere laps from the checkered flag – by a failed Chevy engine. He led more laps than anyone in 1993, just not the final one.

Unfortunately, his victory in 1969 seems too all-too-often get lost in the shuffle. It was a race some predicted he wouldn't win, in a car that possibly shouldn't have been able to, and for a sponsor which never had.

STP had invested considerably over the years to win the 500, but had yet to put a car first across the bricks. The company entered several of the powerful Novis -- and a string of DNFs.  Andy Granatelli and company set the Indy fraternity on its collective ear with the "Wooshmobile" turbine cars in 1967 and '68. In both cases, the machinery gave out while leading the race. It certainly wasn’t for a lack of talent: Over time, the team's driver roster was a top Who's Who list. Still, no milk in Victory Lane for STP.For the 1969 race, Granatelli teamed with Colin Chapman to run new Lotus 64’s. The 64 was technically advanced for the time, both mechanically and aerodynamically. It employed four-wheel drive and an experimental three-speed amidships-mounted gearbox. The year 1969 was also when many cars began to sprout wings, and the Lotus wore them nose and tail. The combination of newly found downforce and traction reduced its straightaway speeds, but made for significantly increased cornering velocity. The result was record lap averages, giving Andretti a strong shot at the pole.

None of it was to matter. The first weekend of qualifying was a rainout. During mid-week practice for the second weekend, Andretti’s right-rear hub sheared off, sending the wheel one way, and everything else into the wall. The crumpled Lotus flashed fire upon impact, but fortunately Mario escaped with relatively minor facial burns and a few bruises.

Graham Hill and Jochen Rindt also were driving 4wd Lotuses, which were withdrawn after Andretti's crash. Meanwhile, the STP team hastily prepared its backup car, the Clint Brawner-designed Hawk. Brawner, along with Jim McGee, was co-chief mechanic of Andretti's team.

The Hawk was an older, more straightforward design than the high-tech Lotus: no four-wheel drive, less advanced aerodynamics and a standard two-speed gearbox configuration. While straightaway speeds were up, it was no match for the cornering speed or stability of the Lotus. Both cars utilized Ford's turbocharged dohc “Indy” V-8, which put out about 700 horses running approximately 80 inches of boost. The Hawk had carried the team to victory at Hanford, California, just a month earlier.

"The car hadn't even been cleaned after the last race," Andretti recalls. "It was in the corner, as we didn’t think we were even going to race it again.” Yet with minimal practice, Andretti qualified the Hawk in the middle of the front row, between pole-sitter A.J. Foyt's Ford-powered Coyote and Bobby Unser's Offy-powered Lola.

'I'll tell you though," he adds, "stepping out of the Lotus and into the Hawk was no trip to Paris."

The team was in the show, but a new problem surfaced: overheating. The Hawk carried a small radiator mounted just over the driver's right shoulder at Hanford, but it was removed for Indy to increase top speed. The decreased water volume also boosted temperatures to dangerously high levels after only a few laps. After qualifying, the crew attempted to remount the radiator, but USAC officials would have none of it, insisting that the car must race in the same aerodynamic configuration in which it qualified.

"You don't like to admit it going in," Andretti says, "but in the back of my mind I figured there's no way this thing is going to go 500 miles."

Andretti led Foyt through the first turn, with A.J. and Lloyd Ruby proving to be his competition. As expected, both the water and oil-temp gauges went sky high, but stabilized and rose no farther. Foyt dropped well back due to turbocharger ills. A pit-stop miscue put the hapless Ruby out – from the lead -- just past halfway. Andretti set a race record by averaging 156.867 miles per hour and won the 500 by nearly two minutes over Dan Gurney, with Unser third.

"The damn thing just hung together," Andretti remembers. "It turned out to be my magic car. I remember in the post-race teardown when we pulled the trans apart, and it seems like everything just crumbled out of the case – the gears were all black and blue and had obviously gotten very hot."

“With as big a lead as I had, you’d like to think you could just relax and truck along a little bit, but during those last few laps, I heard every noise that car made. Every creak, every groan, every click; I was just waiting for the damn thing to just quit. But it turned out to be my day.”

Besides sweating the car’s durability, Andretti endured some difficulty breathing due to his burned nasal passages, and upper lip. And who could forget that magic moment in Victory Lane when Granatelli kissed the winning driver?Andretti went on to claim the USAC Champ Car championship that year as well, and raced at Indy through 1994, retiring from open-wheel competition at the end of that season. He doesn’t at all consider himself unlucky to have won just a single Indy 500 -- “remember, you have to think about all the great drivers that never won it – Gurney, Ruby, my oldest son Michael, and several Bettenhausens and Vukoviches, and so many others that died trying. I’m damn lucky not to be a member of any of those groups.”

Gentlemen, start your engines . . .

FORD PERFORMANCE PHOTOS / COURTESY INDIANAPOLIS MOTOR SPEEDWAY & INDYCAR