Charmed

With fans' support, Andretti taking slump in stride

John Andretti doesn't live in a house full of cracked mirrors, but his fans are convinced that he does.

The Petty Enterprises driver has received all sorts of tokens, trinkets and lucky charms designed to combat a career-worst slump. Fearful that he's a crossed a few black cats, fans have rallied with buckeyes, even a duck's head (wooden, presumably). And the expressions of support have piled high enough that items like personalized clocks from "Your No. 1 fan in Kentucky" have forced Andretti's racing trophies into storage.

"I've gotten stuff from people, coins that they've carried with them daily since they were very young, that they picked up," he says. "It was their good luck charm. Which is really cool because they're giving you something that means a lot to them. It's not just some sort of, 'Well, here's a four-leaf clover.' "

If simple greenery did the job, Andretti would tend his own plot. Clover sprouts in the lawns surrounding Petty Enterprises' North Carolina shop, and someone actually taped a sprig to his No. 43 Dodge at Bristol three weeks ago, but it didn't work. Andretti finished 34th after starting 21st, a predicament that's dogged him like Pig Pen's cloud.

He stands 32nd in the Winston Cup points standings, his most recent outing a 22nd-place finish at Texas. Wrecks, plus mechanical and qualifying gremlins, have troubled him in turns this season, leading to finishes of 37th (Daytona), 15th (Rockingham), 36th (Las Vegas), 36th (Atlanta), 22nd (Darlington), and 34th (Bristol).

This week Andretti returns to the site of his second, and most recent, victory -- the 1999 spring race at Martinsville.

"As ugly as things have happened to us on the race track, behind the scenes it's never like that. So when things turn good, this teams deserves for it to turn good. Not me, but this team." John Andretti

"Everybody wants to win," he says. "Only a liar or an idiot says he doesn't want to."

"He's doing really well," says Kyle Petty, Andretti's teammate and boss. "He's just had incredibly rotten luck is all I can say about it."

That extends back to 2001, a season that Petty, Andretti and teammate Buckshot Jones merely survived. Andretti finished a dismal 31st in the 2001 points race, logging just one top-five and one top-10 finish. Jones and Petty were worse, at 41st and 43rd, respectively.

They did have excuses, one being the switch from Pontiac to Dodge. Another was Kyle Petty's assumption of control of Petty Enterprises. He decided on a complete overhaul -- farming out the engine program to former Robert Yates Racing protégé Mike Ege, having all three teams draw from the same parts well, and in December hiring old friend and crew chief Robin Pemberton to oversee the entire operation.

"Things got luckier this year," Andretti says. "We're lucky that Kyle did a great move with the engine program. We're lucky that he got Robin Pemberton. We're lucky that Robin decided to come. Last year at this time, we were probably in the worst condition that we'd ever been in. We had a changeover [to Dodge], we added a car [Kyle's No. 45]. We had a lot of things that just weren't working."

He says his current team, under the direction of crew chief Gregg Steadman, won't suffer a mid-season implosion if things don't improve.

"The driver hates the crew chief, the crew chief hates this guy, or that guy hates this guy -- the owners," Andretti says, describing a typical garage soap opera. "It just turns ugly. And as ugly as things have happened to us on the race track, behind the scenes it's never like that. So when things turn good, this teams deserves for it to turn good. Not me, but this team."

John Andretti driver's page Andretti's 2002 statistics Buy Andretti merchandise

Meanwhile, his back-of-the-pack experience remains wearisome. A Winston Cup regular since 1994, Andretti joined the Petty stable in 1998, finishing a career-best 11th in points. He finished 17th in 1999, and 23rd in 2000 -- the same year he lost then-crew chief Robbie Loomis to Hendrick Motorsports.

This year, he's lost sleep. He admits working into the wee hours at his home office one evening only to be interrupted by 9-year-old son Jarrett peeping around the doorway, asking what was wrong.

"So he worries about you," Andretti says. "So it's tough. You've got to have good people around you. And you've got to have a lot of support because you can't endure it by yourself."

Andretti counts on wife Nancy, Jarrett, and daughters Amelia and Olivia for his personal leavening. To date, his biggest thrill might have been after Saturday's final practice at Bristol, when a helicopter whisked him to Jarrett's league soccer game in North Carolina -- only the second game Andretti's been able to attend in two years.

"And I love it," he says, describing how Jarrett soldiered through a stomach virus that day. "I think competition is what life is all about. It's not about beating somebody, it's about competing against them. You're gonna win sometimes and they're gonna win sometimes. Nobody wins all the time. Nobody."

Yet the pressure to do so smolders.

Andretti's pedigree smacks of racing royalty; his father Aldo is Mario's twin brother -- yes, that Mario -- and his godfather is A.J. Foyt. He also works for one of NASCAR's royal families, and drives the King's car, Richard Petty's No. 43, all of which feeds his own competitive fire. And if donated talismans turn the tide, so be it.

"I always appreciate people doing that because it means a lot to me that they want something good to happen for you," Andretti says of fans' efforts. "One time I heard my uncle say, 'I'm too religious to be superstitious,' so that works for me, too."

Denise N. Maloof covers NASCAR for CNNSI.com.

 

Related information
Multimedia
Visit Video Plus for the latest audio and video
Search our site	Watch CNN/SI 24 hours a day
	Sports Illustrated and CNN have combined to form a 24 hour sports news and information channel. To receive CNN/SI at your home call your cable operator or DirecTV.