Deep in the heart of Texas, John Andretti had a feeling deep in his own heart that he might have made a really poor decision.

There he sat in Major League Baseball All-Star Jack Clark’s NHRA Top Fuel dragster for an engine warm-up, beginning to wonder why he had agreed to such an enterprise. After all, Andretti swore he truly didn’t have a clue about this unique type of race car, except that it had four wheels, a steering wheel, and an engine. And he hadn’t gotten any pointers from anyone about how to drive this thing.

“I climbed in with the rear wheels jacked up off the ground, and they started the engine. I couldn’t hear anything! And I certainly didn’t know they initially start the car using a (relatively mild) alcohol-based fuel.” He said, “‘This thing doesn’t seem that sporty,’ I thought.”  

Pretty soon, Andretti said he felt like he was “sitting in a Saturn V rocket.  . . . This thing was breathing fire, going chugachugachugachuga like a hell-bound train and rumbling every window in the neighborhood.”

When he climbed from the car, Andretti noticed a boy on a bicycle who had been watching the entire exercise.

“So, how long ya been drag racing?” he asked.

“I’ve never been,” I answered.

“So you’ve never done any drag racing? And you’re going to drive that car?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Huh . . .” he said, pausing before he rode away. “Good luck.”

“I’ll never forget that kid. No wiser words were ever said! I was thinking the exact same thing.”

That’s the kind of humorous, candid, entertaining, insightful narrative that distinguishes Octane Press’ new book, RACER, by John Andretti, as told to Jade Gurss.

John Andretti lost his struggle with colon cancer this Jan. 30, at age 56, but he springs to life from each one of Gurss’ 235 pages.

The Charlotte-based author – who also has worked with Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Darrell Waltrip, penned a series of motorsports books, and worked in marketing and publicity for Ilmor Engineering, Mercedes-Benz, and Mazda – said it was “very important to me that you heard John’s voice, that it was true to his speech patterns. It’s really in his voice.

“It was easy because of who John is and John’s ability to tell great stories. That made it pretty simple for me,” Gurss said. “I was doing my job if I was invisible. Because John was such a great storyteller, I didn’t have to spice up or embellish anything. It was all in his storytelling tone. That made it very easy for me to disappear in[to] his words. I had to organize the book and set the chapters and the flow and all of that. But honestly, I thought my role was to disappear in the writing so that it was all John. When people say they hear John’s voice, well, then that’s very meaningful to me.”

Gurss was able to capture some hilarious lines from Andretti, who shared his story between multiple surgeries and chemotherapy treatments.

One will strike a chord with drag-racing fans. Andretti expressed a genuine fondness for Funny Car superstar John Force before saying, “If you know anything about Force, you know he learned how to whisper in a sawmill!”

Gurss insisted that was not his line but rather Andretti’s.

“That’s purely his,” Gurss said. “John had such a dry wit that sometimes you almost couldn’t tell if he was joking or not.”

Drag-racing fans have no doubt Andretti was telling the truth in this case, and Gurss said, “That was one of his good lines. That was one thing I enjoyed about him, that there was this sly sense of humor through all of his stories. You really had to be really kind of paying attention, I guess, for lack of a better term, to make sure that came through in the book, the twinkle in his eye kind of thing. Sometimes the littlest comments were the funniest.

“He really seemed to enjoy sitting down and telling his stories. There were days we would meet where he clearly was not well or not feeling well, but he’d start on an anecdote or a story and the color would come back in his face or his energy would go up. I was really happy about it, because it was clear it he enjoyed the project and understood the weight of what we were doing, that this was his chance to tell his story to be passed along to all of his grandchildren. So it was kind of that feeling from the start, the weight of it, the importance of it, that I had to do all I could to tell his story as best as I could, based on our interviews,” Gurss said.

And oh, did John Andretti have as many lively stories to spin as Force does. In 1993 alone, Andretti drove seven different kinds of race cars. So it’s only natural that he would have lots of material from which to extract his anecdotes. They touched on his experiences in every form of motorsports, from sports-car racing to the world of midgets and sprints to champ cars (IndyCar) to NASCAR. They were about the heroes of the sport, including A.J. Foyt (his godfather) and Richard Petty. They told the real ordeal of his being the first to compete in the Indianapolis 500 and the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte the same day – complete with how badly he wanted to use the restroom during the mad dash between venues but wasn’t able to do so until after the crankshaft broke on his Billy Hagan-owned Cup car just beyond the halfway point.

And as a member of a heralded racing family, Andretti had plenty of amazing and amusing stories about his father Aldo and mother Corky, Aldo’s twin brother Mario, and cousins Michael and Jeff, as well as of his brother Mark and sister Carolyn. And, of course, readers will find a fair bit of sweet stories about his devoted wife Nancy, tracing their lives together along with children Jarett, Olivia, and Amelia.

For as short as his stint in drag racing was, Andretti considered the people he met and enjoyed there as part of his wide racing family.

“He talked about how he loved the people and how he loved doing burnouts,” Gurss said. “But he said, ‘I like to drive more than five seconds at a time.’ That was not necessarily a criticism but how you have to wait between runs to rebuild everything. He really responded to the people and enjoyed that a lot. I hope that came through in the chapter, which is one of the favorites in the book.”

Andretti’s hearse carried him around the two-and-a-half-mile Indianapolis Motor Speedway oval for one final lap before his burial Feb. 6. But just a few miles from his beloved racetrack – a world away from racing but a world that has seen its own brand of drama, trauma, and triumph – sits Riley Hospital for Children. The patients there and their families long have been family to him, too. Riley has been in the hearts of John Andretti and his entire family, since Aldo and Corky Andretti were raising their family.

John Andretti helped raise millions of dollars for the hospital and its foundation in his nearly 25 years of commitment.

But to hear him tell it in RACER, he was the actual beneficiary in the longstanding relationship: “You don’t have to be a saint. Nobody is expecting that of anybody. And I’m surely not one, by far. But you know the difference between right and wrong and the value of doing something good for somebody else. I learn a lot from these kids. . . . If you ever want to put your feet back on the ground, go see those kids and their families. You’ll see the battles they’re fighting, and it changes your perspective on your own life. That’s why I don’t say, ‘Why me?’ [with his colon cancer].  . . . I’ve been gifted and blessed. Whatever happens, happens. The biggest blessing of all is to be around people you love and people who have compassion for others. Because you get so much more back than you can ever give.”

Even after his passing, Andretti still is giving to Riley. Ten percent of the proceeds from sales of RACER – as well as 100 percent of the Andretti family’s earnings from the book project – are donated to the Race For Riley initiative and the Riley Children’s Foundation.     

Gurss said of Andretti, “He really had his priorities straight. In my career I’ve worked for so many drivers, but I’ve always loved the ones who had their priorities together or they weren’t all racing all the time. John just really had such strong sense of family. That really is the thread that carries through the whole book. It’s called “Racer,” and it certainly is about racing, but it’s family, really.”

Anyone who reads every heartwarming, comical, inspirational word in RACER will feel like part of John Andretti’s family, too.

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