# Mario Andretti Won Indy, Daytona and F1 — Once Each
> Mario Andretti is the only driver to win the Indianapolis 500, the Daytona 500 and the Formula 1 title. Thirteen rankings, from IndyCar greats to Italian-American athletes.
*By YPB Team · Published August 20, 2026 · https://youpick.best/articles/mario-andretti-ranked-many-ways*
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Mario Andretti at Goodwood in 2021. Photo: United Autosports, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Mario Andretti won the Formula 1 world championship, the Indianapolis 500 and the Daytona 500, and no other driver has done all three. His record runs from 1961 to 2000 and holds 111 victories in single-seaters, stock cars and sports cars.1
This season his name is back on a Formula 1 entry list. Cadillac joined the grid in 2026 and called its first chassis the MAC-26, short for Mario Andretti Cadillac, announced the day before his 86th birthday.3
> Thirteen lists, four different sports, and the place Andretti belongs most, Indianapolis, is the one that gave him a single win in twenty-nine tries.
## Mario Andretti vs A.J. Foyt: American racing's oldest disagreement
Every list of great American drivers has to reconcile two careers that barely overlap. Andretti built his abroad; Foyt built his at home.
Andretti's case is breadth. He took four national championships in 1965, 1966, 1969 and 1984, won the 1967 Daytona 500 in a stock car, and closed out a world championship in Europe in 1978.1
Foyt's case is depth at the one place American racing cares about most, with four Indianapolis 500 wins. Most other names on the list made the same trade: Richard Petty's 200 NASCAR victories, Dale Earnhardt's seven championships, Rick Mears' four Indy 500s.
Both men keep landing on this kind of list because neither definition of greatness has won. One is a passport, the other a trophy case.
Eighteen Americans, four different sports, one list. Play it →
## Al Unser, Mario Andretti and 67 pole positions
Andretti's Indy-car record reads like a specialist's, which is the strange part. He started 407 races in the category, won 52 of them and took 67 poles, still the all-time mark.1
Al Unser answers with four Indianapolis 500 victories and a career that ran from 1965 to 1994.
Michael Andretti is on this list too, with 42 wins and the 1991 championship. Father and son are separated here by opinion rather than by era, which happens almost nowhere else in sport.
Scott Dixon, Hélio Castroneves and Dario Franchitti carry the modern case, and Dixon's six championships are more than any Andretti won in the series.
Four national titles and 52 wins, next to a four-time Indy 500 winner. Play it →
## Johnny Rutherford has three Indy 500s. Andretti has one.
This is the ranking where Andretti's record looks thin. He won the Indianapolis 500 in 1969, on his fifth attempt, and never won it again.4
Johnny Rutherford won it three times, Foyt and Al Unser four each, Castroneves four.
Andretti started the race twenty-nine times and finished all five hundred miles on five of those days.4
Thirteen winners of the same race, and thirteen very different totals. Play it →
## Kimi Räikkönen vs Mario Andretti: the one-title club
Sixteen drivers have won the Formula 1 championship exactly once, which makes this a list of great careers and lucky seasons in roughly equal measure.
Andretti's 1978 entry is one of the strongest: six wins that year, five of them in the Lotus 79, from a career of 128 starts and 12 victories.2
Kimi Räikkönen took his title for Ferrari in 2007 by a single point and then raced on for another decade, which is longevity the list has no column for.
James Hunt, Jody Scheckter, Damon Hill and Nico Rosberg are all here, holding the same trophy after wildly different seasons.
Sixteen drivers, one title each, and no agreement on what that is worth. Play it →
## Emerson Fittipaldi, Andretti and the 1970s title carousel
Seven drivers won the Formula 1 championship in the 1970s and Andretti took the last but one, in 1978.2
Emerson Fittipaldi won two of them, in 1972 and 1974, the first for Lotus and the second for McLaren.
Jackie Stewart and Niki Lauda also have two each from the decade, and Jochen Rindt has the one nobody wants: the 1970 title, confirmed after he was killed at Monza.
The decade's honours list doubles as its casualty list, which is the context every name here carries.
Seven champions in ten seasons, most of them still argued over. Play it →
## Jim Clark vs Mario Andretti: who is the greatest Lotus driver?
Colin Chapman's team is where Andretti's engineering reputation was made. He helped develop the ground-effect Lotus 78 and 79 and won the 1978 championship in them, taking five of that season's six victories in the 79.2
Jim Clark is the obvious counter and probably the answer: two world titles, 25 grand prix wins for Lotus, and the 1965 Indianapolis 500 in a Lotus 38.
Ayrton Senna won six races in black-and-gold Lotus colours before McLaren, and Rindt and Fittipaldi took championships in the same overalls.
Andretti is the only driver in that group who was also winning American national championships in the same years, and that is the case for putting him near the top rather than in the middle.
One team, sixteen drivers, four world championships between a handful of them. Play it →
## Graham Hill's Triple Crown against Andretti's four sports
This ranking is built for the shape of Andretti's career, and he still has to fight for it. He holds a Formula 1 title, an Indianapolis 500, a Daytona 500 and three wins in the 12 Hours of Sebring.1
Graham Hill's claim is tidier. Monaco, Indianapolis and Le Mans remain the only completed Triple Crown in motorsport.
A.J. Foyt's is broader again, with victories at Indianapolis, Daytona, Sebring and Le Mans on the same résumé.
Others on the list measure versatility differently: John Surtees won world championships on motorcycles and in cars, Juan Pablo Montoya won the Indianapolis 500, the Daytona 500 and grands prix at Monaco and Monza, and Fernando Alonso added Le Mans and Daytona wins to two Formula 1 titles.
Fifteen drivers who refused to stay in one category. Play it →
## Richard Petty won the Daytona 500 seven times. Andretti won it once.
Andretti's stock-car career amounts to one result that matters. He won the 1967 Daytona 500 and never won another NASCAR Cup race.1
Richard Petty won the same race seven times between 1964 and 1981.
Cale Yarborough won it four times, Dale Earnhardt lost it in every available way before finally winning in 1998, and Denny Hamlin has three.
A single victory by a visiting open-wheel driver is the least defensible entry on any list of great Daytona winners. It is also the exact reason his record is what it is.
Sixteen Daytona winners, from seven-time champions to one-off visitors. Play it →
## Tom Kristensen owns Sebring. Andretti visited three times.
Sebring is America's endurance classic, and Andretti won it three times between 1967 and 1972.1
Tom Kristensen won it six times, Rinaldo Capello five, Allan McNish and Frank Biela four each.
Those are careers spent almost entirely in prototypes, and that is the difference worth noticing: Andretti's three wins came in years when he was also racing Formula 1 cars and Indy cars.
Fourteen Sebring winners, most of them endurance specialists. Play it →
## Michael Andretti led more Indianapolis laps than any driver who never won
The Indianapolis 500 has its own category of loser, and the Andrettis have supplied three generations of them. Mario won in 1969 and then went twenty-four straight years without another victory at the Speedway.4
Michael Andretti went 0-for-16 as a driver there and still holds the records for the most laps completed and the most laps led by anyone who never won the race.5
Marco Andretti lost the 2006 race to Sam Hornish Jr. by 0.0635 seconds as a teenage rookie, and Lloyd Ruby and Ted Horn are the historical version of the same thing: Horn finished fourth or better nine years running without winning.5
The strangest entry belongs to Mario again. In 1981 he was declared the winner the day after finishing second, and a USAC appeal panel handed the victory back to Bobby Unser that October.4
The only list here where three Andrettis qualify. Play it →
## The Andrettis vs the Unsers: nine Indianapolis 500s against one
Motorsport keeps producing families, and this ranking sets the two great American ones against each other. Al Unser Sr. won four Indianapolis 500s, Bobby three and Al Unser Jr. two: nine between them, against the Andrettis' one.
The Andretti case is range instead of repetition. Mario's world championship, Michael's 42 Indy-car wins and Marco's career put three generations on the same entry lists, and the surname is now on a Formula 1 chassis.3
The Pettys bring 264 NASCAR victories across Lee, Richard and Kyle. The Schumachers bring seven world titles and a second-generation driver still racing.
Almost every family on this list is famous inside one series. The Andrettis are the exception, which is either the strongest case here or beside the point, depending on what a dynasty is supposed to mean.
Here the option is the surname, not the driver. Play it →
## Danica Patrick, Mario Andretti and 41 years between rookie awards
Andretti won the IndyCar Rookie of the Year award in 1965 and his grandson won the same award in 2006, a gap only a racing family can produce.
Danica Patrick took it in 2005, the year she led laps at Indianapolis as a rookie and finished fourth.
The list holds names from Foyt's era through to Felix Rosenqvist, and its real use is as a reminder that a rookie award predicts nothing: Andretti won four national championships afterwards, and several names here never won a major race at all.
Eighteen rookie-award winners, four decades apart at the extremes. Play it →
## Joe DiMaggio, Rocky Marciano and the boy from Montona
The final list drops motorsport entirely. Andretti was born in Montona, near Trieste, in February 1940, and reached Nazareth, Pennsylvania as a teenager with his twin brother Aldo.2
Joe DiMaggio and Rocky Marciano are the names this list belongs to. A 56-game hitting streak and a 49-0 record are the kind of numbers that end conversations.
Vince Lombardi, Joe Montana, Yogi Berra and Dan Marino make the rest of it a baseball and football list with one racing driver standing in the middle of it.
Andretti's answer is that the Associated Press named him its Driver of the Century in December 1999, and that no other name here won a world championship in a European sport.1
Fifteen athletes, one of whom raced for a living. Play it →
## Thirty-nine years of racing, and Indianapolis still has the last word
Andretti's résumé is the widest in American motorsport and the least tidy: a world championship, a Daytona 500, three Sebrings, four national titles, and one win at the race his family is most closely associated with. His last victory came at Phoenix in April 1993, aged 53, which made him the oldest driver to win an Indy-car race on a conventional course and the first to win in four different decades.6
Thirteen rankings sort him thirteen ways, because each starts from a different question and gets its answer one matchup at a time.
Got a driver the lists keep filing in the wrong category? Make the ranking that puts them where you think they belong.
## More rankings, more angles
- [How Many Ways Can You Rank Fernando Alonso?](/articles/how-many-ways-to-rank-fernando-alonso) — two F1 titles, Le Mans, Daytona, no Indy 500
- [Senna vs Prost: 14 Rankings, One Argument](/articles/senna-vs-prost-ranked) — the rivalry that followed Andretti's Lotus era
- [Ferrari, Ranked Many Ways](/articles/ferrari-ranked-many-ways) — the team that gave Andretti his first grand prix win
Sources
Mario Andretti, official career highlights — 111 career wins 1961–2000, four national championships (1965, 1966, 1969, 1984), 1969 Indianapolis 500, 1967 Daytona 500, three 12 Hours of Sebring wins, 52 Indy-car wins, 67 poles, 407 starts, AP Driver of the Century (10 December 1999): marioandretti.com (checked 2026-08-20)
Formula 1 Hall of Fame — 128 starts, 12 wins, the 1978 title with six victories (five in the Lotus 79), debut on pole at the 1968 US Grand Prix, first win for Ferrari in 1971, final race at Monza in 1982, birth in Montona and the move to Nazareth: formula1.com (checked 2026-08-20)
Cadillac Formula 1 Team — the MAC-26 chassis name, announced 27 February 2026, with Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as its first drivers: cadillacf1team.com (checked 2026-08-20)
Wikipedia, "Andretti curse" — 29 Indianapolis 500 starts with one win, five races completed in full, and the 1981 result reversed by a USAC appeal panel in October 1981: en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-08-20)
ESPN — Michael Andretti's 0-for-16 record and his laps-led mark at Indianapolis, and Marco Andretti's 0.0635-second defeat in 2006: espn.com (checked 2026-08-20)
IndyCar — the 1993 Valvoline 200 at Phoenix as Andretti's final win, at 53 years and one month, and the first Indy-car victories in four separate decades: indycar.com (checked 2026-08-20)
