His driver had nearly been killed, for one thing. Brawner had been right, but it brought him little satisfaction. Sure enough, the right rear hub had failed. Andretti “running down the Hawk like that hurt my feelings,” Brawner wrote, “and at the same time made me mad.” Examining the Lotus wreckage revealed the cause of the accident. The Hawk was as conventional as the Lotus was radical, but it was a proven winner. “Don’t ask him what time it is or he’ll tell you how his watch was built!” When Brawner overheard Andretti telling a reporter the Lotus was “the finest car, by far, I’ve ever had at Indianapolis,” he took it as an insult to his own Brawner Hawk, the latest evolution of the car Andretti had driven to two USAC championships and very nearly two more.
“In some ways, Clint was a maddening kind of guy, kind of sorry for himself,” Andretti told Nigel Roebuck in 1979. Indeed, “fragile” and “temperamental”-two more words Brawner used to describe the Lotus-applied equally to the 19-year Speedway veteran himself. I think at that point we were the envy of the field because we had, definitely, something that was superior.” The opinion put him at odds with his mechanic, and not for the first time. the potential winning quality was there, no question. “I felt, you know, what a package!” Andretti tells Autoweek today.
Clint Brawner resisted the urge to say, “I told you so.” The 52-year-old chief mechanic had made plain his opinion of the four-wheel-drive Lotus 64 making its debut ahead of the 1969 Indianapolis 500: It was flimsy, overly complicated, diabolically packaged, “a terrible car,” as he put it in his 1975 memoir. At a time when such a crash quite often proved lethal, that Mario Andretti had gotten away with only some burns to his face bordered on the miraculous. Even at this grainy remove, it’s still startling, though, how quickly it happens: the car hitting the turn 4 wall and erupting into a fireball, shedding wheels and bodywork as it slides across the track toward the infield, not yet fully stopped when a figure in white improbably leaps from the wreckage and runs to the fence.
You can find the footage on YouTube, a faded Kodachrome snippet recalling the Zapruder film.
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