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Steve Rider: Mario Andretti

Formula 1 memories of Mario Andretti

I was never particularly a fan of motorsport as I’d never had any real exposure to it as a kid , so my love of it grew through broadcasting of it. I was working for Anglia Television, just down the road from Snetterton, where a lot of testing went on and we were based just a couple of miles from Ketteringham Hall, where Colin Chapman had based his Lotus F1 team. This was a Lotus team that was winning the world championship with Mario Andretti. I was lucky enough to be able to do a lot of filming with Colin Chapman and the team.

My biggest memory of that era was of the impression Mario Andretti made on me. He oozed superstar qualities and charisma and he still had that when I went back to interview him in 2012 for the Sky Formula One Legends series.

At the time of working for Anglia, I had a smallholding, we had pigs and sheep and I was living the country life. One day my car broke down, so I had to take the van from the smallholding into work instead. It was a DAF vario-matic, it ran on a rubber band, the passenger door would not work and there were straw bales in the back.

Half way through the afternoon, the news editor came up to me to say there was a bit of a crisis. They had no transport available. Could I get up to Ketteringham Hall immediately and bring Mario Andretti back to the studios for an interview. There was no opportunity to argue, or explain, I was told in no uncertain terms to get myself up to the hall and bring Mario back.

So I drove up to the front of Ketteringham Hall in my DAF vario-matic van, with straw bales in the back and Mario Andretti appears. His face was an absolute picture. He had to clamber over the driver’s seat and I then chauffeured him to the studios in the centre of Norwich. I think it probably changed his perspective on the whole world of motor racing....

Steve Rider

 

 

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Memory added on May 20, 2013

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