Why enigmatic Marco Andretti will be missed

By:

David Malsher-Lopez

Jan 19, 2021, 7:22 PM

Last Friday, Marco Andretti announced he is withdrawing from fulltime IndyCar racing. David Malsher-Lopez explains how this third-gen racer was a puzzle in the car, but a straight shooter off-track.

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It’s been many years since I took hand-written notes during a motorsport press conference; I prefer eye contact with the speaker and therefore rely on a trusty voice recorder to catch all the words. But ‘all the words’ is precisely the downside of recording devices.

If the acoustics of the room allows me to keep the gadget in hand it can of course be paused whenever a media member decides to ask the subject about his kids or diet or social media antics, etc. But if mine is among the cluster of devices several feet away on the desk in front of the interviewee, then come transcribing time, I’m plowing through everything to rediscover nuggets of information and insight while reliving the experience of a driver and audience being whipped up into a coma by prattle and platitudes.

David Malsher-Lopez

David Malsher-Lopez is Motorsport.com’s U.S. editor, covering the NTT IndyCar Series and IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship. Since completing journalism college in 1994, he has worked for Autosport, TRMG, Motor Sport, Autosport (again) and Racer, before joining Motorsport.com in 2015… where he has found himself enjoying a third spell writing for Autosport. Over the course of those 27 years, he has served as a journalist, sub-editor, features editor, deputy editor and editor. In 2015, he also wrote Will Power’s biography. David lives with his wife Sophia in California and when not writing about racing, he will be found reading about planes and classic cars, attending airshows, listening to a wide variety of music or watching cop shows from the ’70s. He intends to one day own a grand piano, an Airedale terrier and a vintage Pontiac. He doesn’t do Facebook and doesn’t understand Instagram but can be found @DavidMalsher on Twitter.