Marco Andretti focused on regaining momentum

With resources like legend Mario Andretti to call upon, Marco Andretti should have little trouble avoiding the pitfalls that sidetracked his sophomore IndyCar season. AP

"It's not whether you get knocked down. It's whether you get up."
-- Vince Lombardi

Marco Andretti understands what the legendary football coach had to say about adversity all too well after his rough-and-tumble 2007 IndyCar season.

It's a lesson Andretti didn't have much reason to learn before now. Born of blue blood racing heritage, Andretti, by the age of 19, was an IndyCar race winner and had finished second in the Indianapolis 500 by a car length at 220 miles per hour. The performance left Michael's son and Mario's grandson the Rookie of the Year at both Indy and for the season in 2006. With virtually no previous oval experience, he was seventh in a championship that had 10 of 14 races on ovals.

Marco was a natural, a wunderkind, born to win races and championships. With a start like that, what could go wrong for Andretti?

Last season ... everything.

From bad cars to bad crashes, Andretti could do little right. He was running at the finish in only seven of 17 races and was 11th in the points in a series that had only 17 drivers start every race.

Now at the ripe age of 21, Andretti will be on the comeback trail Saturday night when the IndyCar season begins at Homestead-Miami Speedway.

"Last year was a character builder," Andretti said. "That's how I look at it, and the first thing in my approach to 2008 is to forget 2007. Obviously, [we] don't [want] to forget some of the things we learned the hard way, because a lot of them were driver error and stuff like that. That's stuff we can take from last year and try to fix.

"It's tough on your confidence, but I think if you're able to bounce back after a year like that, it's where you're going to get stronger. [But] some things were out of my control as well."

Michael Andretti knows exactly what Marco went through last year. It was strikingly similar to his second season in CART in 1985, when Michael finished only six of 15 starts. He'd been seventh in the championship in his first full season of '84.

"My first year, everything was going great and it was happening easy," Michael remembered. "[In 1985] it was a disastrous season. It was very similar to Marco's second season. It went bad, bad, bad and then by the end of the year, it started to go back on an upward swing. I started to understand where I needed to work. It started to get better, and that's exactly what was happening with [Michael] in the last five races or so. He was very competitive.

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