It has always taken a little more time than usual to get things done at Indianapolis. It is a city that operates at a deliberate pace. Do not go too fast. Do not go too slow. Just take your time and make sure you get there safely. Got it? The 1969 race would stand out as the first Indianapolis 500 to have all 33 cars start with the engines behind the drivers. It had taken nine years to accomplish what Formula 1 had done in only four.

Dan Gurney, one of the first to correctly forecast the changeover at Indianapolis, returned with his latest creation. With its aerodynamic look, it was state-of-the-art for late 1960s technology. The new car was designated the Eagle Mark 7, but was better known as the ‘Santa Ana’, which was the location in California of the All American Racers headquarters and shop. The car was designed by Tony Southgate following his successful work on the Mark 4.

The latest AAR creation was wedge-shaped and wider than any previous Eagle. A Gurney Weslake-Ford V8 powered Gurney’s car while team-mate Denis Hulme’s was propelled by a turbocharged DOHC Ford V8 unit. The AAR team entered a third new car as a back-up, powered by a turbocharged Ford. A fourth new Eagle, turbocharged and Ford-powered, was sold to Smokey Yunick for Joe Leonard.

After starting Indy’s rear-engine revolution in 1961, Jack Brabham – by now a three-time F1 world champion – returned as a first-time entrant in ’68, and for ’69 he ran a two-car effort, assigning one of the cars to himself, paired with American rookie driver Peter Revson.

“The All American Racers’ creation was wedge-shaped and wider than any previous Eagle”

The road-racing world was also well represented that May with the arrival of a new team entered by US Racing Inc. It is now better known as Team Penske and its driver, while designated a rookie, was the highly regarded Mark Donohue. After a very successful career as a driver, Roger Penske formed a team around Donohue and would become a major influence, making IndyCar racing more professional as the series began to get more support and involvement from Corporate America. Penske’s always tidy-looking crew and their immaculate four-wheel-drive Lola-Offenhauser T152 made them stand out in a positive way.

The 1969 500 would be Donohue’s first IndyCar start of the year, plus his first time on an oval track and only his fourth IndyCar event. Donohue & Co lived up to expectations and performed well right from the start of the month, never looking like a rookie driver or a rookie team.

Of course, being a rookie at Indy had its peculiarities, starting with the driver test. In Michael Argetsinger’s 2009 book Mark Donohue: Technical Excellence at Speed, Donohue was quoted: “To be a rookie again after almost 10 years racing is an interesting situation. But after practising and passing the driver’s test, I could see the point.” Donohue sailed through the phases of controlled runs to pass the test. The new Indy team of Penske was off to a good start.

There was also a newly revised team at Indy in May – Vel’s Parnelli Jones Racing. After campaigning a Mongoose-Ford with George Snider and Joe Leonard under the name of Vel’s Racing Team the previous two seasons, it regrouped. The team had bought the assets from Reztloff Racing, who had assumed the mantle of the official Lola factory team. Top mechanic George Bignotti was part of the revision, as was its driver, rising star Al Unser.

“Unser went out joyriding on a trail bike. He had a mishap that left him with a broken ankle”

For 1969, the team had a choice of running a year-old Lola-Ford T150 or a new wedge-shaped, Ford-powered car that looked very much like the Lotus 56 but for obvious reasons was called the Parnelli. Selecting the Lola over the Parnelli, Unser became one of the month’s early contenders, posting speeds not far off the practice pace set by Mario Andretti and AJ Foyt.

However, a freak accident gave the team and driver a major setback. After the opening day of qualifying was washed out, Unser and Parnelli Jones went out joyriding on their trail bikes in the infield. Trying to cross a ditch, Unser had a mishap that left him with a broken ankle and a seat on the sidelines for several weeks. More importantly, he would not be racing at the Indy 500 in 1969. Unser’s Lola-Ford was taken over by the very capable veteran Bud Tingelstad.

In Joe Scalzo’s 1971 book The Unbelievable Unsers, long-time team manager Jimmy Dilamarter remembered: “By the time I got to where Al was, they were loading him into an ambulance. What I found out later was Al had ridden into a ditch and when he tried to run up the other side at 10mph he lost balance. The bike had fallen on him. The gearlever had gone through his ankle and was sticking out the other side of his foot.

“That poor guy was all alone out there. Al had to pull that shifter out of his leg by himself. Then he had to get to his feet, restart his motorcycle and ride nearly a quarter of a mile to find someone to help him.”

With the United States Auto Club coming out with more new rules designed to make the turbine engine even more uncompetitive, its previous adherents – the Granatelli brothers and Team Lotus – needed a fresh direction. Lotus found it with a sleek new car, the Type 64 that featured four-wheel drive and the powerful turbocharged DOHC Ford V8. This would be the main thrust of the STP Lotus effort with four new cars and three assigned to an impressive driver line-up of two-time 500 pole winner Mario Andretti, 1966 500 winner Graham Hill and highly regarded F1 star Jochen Rindt, who was now Hill’s team-mate in Formula 1.

The Granatellis did not stop with the Lotus entries. There was the No40 Offenhauser-powered replica of the Type 56 wedge-shaped Lotus that the Granatellis had built themselves. There was the No 57 wedge-shaped Gerhardt-Offy. There was a futuristic-looking car originally assigned to Art Pollard notable not only by its aerodynamic shape but also by its Plymouth V8 engine. After determining that the aero package did not work, the car underwent some bodywork changes with the result that it would look more like a Type 56 Lotus, but without the turbine engine.

“Just as I pointed the car into the turn, I heard a ‘whirr-r-r’. It’s a sickening sound for a race driver”

The STP team had three other entries with no engines or chassis specified. There was also the new Brawner Hawk III that Andretti had used to win the April IndyCar event at Hanford, California. This car was part of the acquisition made by the Granatellis when they bought out Andretti, who had assumed ownership of the former Dean Van Lines team. Despite all the money and attention poured into new equipment by the Granatellis, few would have predicted which car would wind up beating them all.

Others stuck with cigar-shape tubs but even those designs had started to sprout nose wings and/or nose lip spoilers while also incorporating engine cover spoilers, as per the USAC regulations governing aerodynamic aids behind the cockpit. A good example was the new Coyote entered by Ansted-Thompson Racing. Team leader Foyt’s 1969 Coyote featured a slightly bulkier look to accommodate the turbocharged Ford engine, which was covered by what looked like three separate wings. But they were judged to be the ‘cover’ for the engine. Roger McCluskey and George Snider were Foyt’s team-mates, with McCluskey in a new Coyote (with no wing/engine cover) and Snider using a year-old and slightly revised Coyote.

For a significant part of the month, the Lotus of Andretti was the fastest car at the track. And why not? After all, Andretti, usually the fastest man at Indy in recent years, was now driving the much-feared Lotus-Ford combination. Only Foyt stayed close in speeds and although the latest Coyote was more of a traditional design, it at least had its own collection of aerodynamic aids. The daily duel for top speed at the track between Andretti and Foyt was one for the ages. For several days, ‘Happy Hour’ would feature a battle between the two. Back then, Happy Hour referred to the final 60 minutes of practice (ending at 6pm) and because the main grandstand shaded the front stretch during that time, the cooler pavement helped produce the quickest speeds of the day. Andretti and Foyt thrilled the fans with their daily battle for top speed with one recording a fast lap and the other going right out afterwards and topping it. Interestingly, the two seldom ran together.

With all the excitement centred on the Andretti-Foyt practice battle, it was suddenly qualifying weekend. Unfortunately for all concerned, Mother Nature refused to co-operate. By Wednesday, the focus was back on the oncoming qualification weekend and this time it was Foyt who threw down the gauntlet, posting the month’s quickest speed at 172.315mph.

As had been the case in previous practice days, it was now Andretti’s turn to go out in the STP Lotus-Ford and top him. Unfortunately, as Andretti built enough speed to make his first ‘flyer’ lap, the right-rear hub carrier collapsed and the wheel separated from the car, which then backed into the Turn 4 wall extremely hard. By the time it came to a halt, the new Lotus was a total wreck and Andretti, who had not yet adopted the new full-face helmet, was slightly burned on his upper lip and the tip of his nose.

“When I am preparing to run my first hot lap of a practice session, I follow a standard procedure. I stand on it down the back stretch, feel my way through Turn 3, then really cut loose in the short chute in order to get a good run out of Turn 4,” Andretti explained in his 1970 book What’s it Like out There?. “Going down the backstretch and through the third turn, everything sounded lovely. But I never got out of Turn 4.

“I felt intense heat. I thank the dear Lord that I wasn’t stunned by the impact”

“Just as I pointed the car into the fourth turn, I heard a ‘whirr-r-r’. It’s a sickening sound to a race driver. It means something is coming off the machine. At first I thought another U-joint had broken and torn the suspension. But as the car went around, I saw a wheel in the air and knew I was on a tricycle. The right rear of the car dug in and slammed into the wall backwards. All sorts of garbage started flying off the car. The moment the car hit the wall, I felt intense heat – fire! I thank the dear Lord that I wasn’t stunned by the impact. I covered my face with one hand and unsnapped the seatbelt with the other. By this time I could feel the heat through my uniform. That wasn’t too bad, but the heat around my face was almost unbearable.

“I managed to jump out while the car was still moving. Pollard, who had been right behind me in an STP team car [the No57 Gerhardt-Offy] and did what must have been a brilliant job of getting through my mess without crashing, ran over to me. Right away, I asked Pollard: ‘What about my face?’ Art’s reply was a great relief. ‘It’s starting to blister so that’s a good sign. I would say first degree – second degree at the worst.’ I was amazed that I wasn’t even really shaken up. Of course, my face hurt badly, but there didn’t seem to be any bruises or sore spots.”

The failure was due to Colin Chapman’s penchant for cutting corners in attempts to make his cars as light as possible. With time running out, there was no way Lotus could rectify what clearly was a design flaw. And so Team Lotus, the once mighty force in IndyCar racing, withdrew from the 500, never to return.

Andretti, of course, had STP entries to choose from but not so surprisingly chose the already victorious Brawner Hawk III. By Friday, he quickly got the back-up Hawk up to speed although not quite as fast as he had been travelling in the Lotus. In a matter of a couple of days, it was a turn-around now in Foyt’s favour. With Al Unser sidelined and Andretti’s fastest car wrecked, it should have been smooth sailing for the three-time 500 winner. However, things do not always work out as planned, especially at Indianapolis.

Foyt did get his second Indy pole, but at a slower-than-expected 170.568mph. Andretti, somewhat uplifted by Foyt’s loss of speed, qualified the Hawk in second position at 169.851mph with 1968 winner Bobby Unser filling out the front row at 169.653mph in the Bardahl-sponsored Leader Card entry, a four-wheel-drive Lola-Offenhauser T152.

Donohue was impressive in qualifying fourth, the best effort for a rookie since Andretti in 1965. He was elated after his qualifying run temporarily put him on row one. In the Argetsinger biography, he said: “I did it. I’m qualified, I’m on the front row. I know it won’t stand up, but for right now I’m on the front row.”

The Team Lotus saga for that year was totally unexpected. For the first time since 1963 there would be no Lotus chassis competing in the Indianapolis 500. The downfall seemed to begin when Andretti’s team-mates, Hill and Rindt, arrived to take their first laps of the month at Indy. Andretti at least had the advantage of considerable test miles to overcome a lengthy list of problems with the car discovered in its earliest tests in the US. Hill had done shakedown runs on the Lotus test track at Hethel but the car ran there without any of its winged body pieces and the Hethel track in no way resembled the 2.5-mile superspeedway at Indianapolis or generated the speeds run at IMS.

Neither of the Team Lotus F1 drivers could find speed and both spun out without making contact with the wall. Rindt had the added embarrassment of spinning at under 100mph, but it is important to remember that Andretti had found the new car a handful in his first test. As qualifying approached, Hill and Rindt were nowhere near the speeds already posted by Andretti but, perhaps even more important, they were nowhere near a good enough speed to safely make the race. The rainy weather that washed out the opening weekend was definitely a godsend for the struggling Lotus drivers. In the long run, it proved to be a hidden blessing for Andretti as well.

Had the first weekend of qualifying not been cancelled due to rain, Andretti would have qualified the Lotus and possibly discovered its shortcomings in the race instead of practice. And those shortcomings most likely would have cost him what ended up being his only 500 win.

“To be honest, I was concerned about the car. But my main worry was actually the gearbox”

“To be honest, I was concerned about the car,” Andretti recalled for this author in a magazine interview. “But my main worry was actually the gearbox. It was a three-speed gearbox and it was mounted in front of the engine, almost directly under the seat in the cockpit. I thought that might be the car’s weak point.”

Following the withdrawal of Team Lotus, the story took an interesting twist. There apparently was some legal dispute as to who actually owned the three remaining STP-sponsored Lotus 64s. In his 1996 book Team Lotus: The Indianapolis Years, former team manager Andrew Ferguson related the story of how the cars were secretly removed from IMS and temporarily hidden in garages in a nearby neighbourhood before they could be shipped back to England and out of any American legal jurisdiction. Ferguson left Lotus after 1969, but returned in 1976 to find the three Lotus 64 chassis still in their original packing crates from Indianapolis, unopened since their arrival at the Lotus factory seven years earlier.

With the fastest 500 field ever, pre-race speculation centred on which driver had the best chance to win. The Penske reputation was such that the rookie team and driver got an unusually high number of votes as pre-race favourites. Penske was supposedly on a three-year plan to win, but Donohue’s performance all month meant there was every reason to believe that the team might make it to Victory Lane well ahead of time.

Andretti, perhaps by virtue of having a wider line entering Turn 1 over pole-winner Foyt, jumped into the lead and stayed there for the first five laps. An overheating problem had plagued the STP Hawk-Ford in practice and an attempt to add an extra radiator was denied by USAC. Clint Brawner came up with another less obvious idea to help cool the engine but it was still going to be up to Andretti to closely monitor the temperature gauge and keep the car from overheating too much. As Andretti eased back to cool the car, Foyt took the lead and stayed there for the next 47 laps before he and Andretti pitted on lap 52. That allowed Wally Dallenbach to lead for the first time in his 500 career and he stayed out in front until pitting on lap 59. Foyt reassumed the lead and kept it through to lap 78, when Lloyd Ruby, in his Mongoose-Offenhauser, passed for first place. Now Foyt was beginning to have turbocharger problems that would take him out of contention. Although he would finish eighth, he would be 18 laps behind the winner. It was now shaping up to be a race between Ruby and Andretti.

Andretti took over the lead on lap 87 and held it through to lap 102 when he pitted for a second time. Ruby briefly led, but pitted on lap 105, handing the lead back to Andretti. With Foyt out of contention and only Ruby to worry about, Andretti’s biggest source of concern (besides his engine temperature) suddenly dropped out in the way that only someone like Ruby could drop out. Given the signal to leave the pit, Ruby accelerated, but the fuel hose was still coupled to the tank and the forward movement of the red-and-yellow Wynn’s Special ripped a hole in the left-side tank, allowing fuel to gush out. Another possible 500 victory had slipped away from Ole Rube.

“The 1960s at Indy closed with a flourish with speeds 20mph faster than the start of the decade”

For the rest of the race, all Andretti had to do was keep an eye on the temperature gauge and not let the engine overheat. Gurney, who had started 10th, was nearly two laps behind when the chequered flag fell. Andretti recorded what incredibly would be his only Indianapolis 500 victory while Gurney finished runner-up for the second straight year.

In What’s it Like out There?, Andretti tried to put into words what it meant to have won the Indianapolis 500. “I’d like to tell you what I felt at the moment, but there is no way. Too many thoughts were battling their way through my mind. I took a safety lap, pulled into Victory Lane and made my biggest mistake… I forgot to duck and nearly got crushed by an Italian panda bear.”

The ‘bear’ was Andy Granatelli, who planted a much-photographed kiss on Andretti’s cheek. Granatelli and his brothers had poured their hearts and souls into their Indy 500 programmes that dated back to the 1940s. They had finished second, led laps and won poles, but had never won the race despite being in position to do so in 1966, ’67 and ’68. After a quick start to the month, the Lotus disaster seemed to put winning in 1969 out of reach. But now the Granatellis and Andretti were 500 winners. As Graham Hill had said, they “drank the milk”.

A magneto failure required a stop that exceeded 10 minutes and took Donohue out of contention. Because Donohue had been so impressive all month and had run as high as third, he still earned the Rookie of the Year award, much to the chagrin of Revson – fifth in the Brabham – who vocally objected, pointing out that the highest rookie always got the award. But that was not the case. Only three years earlier, even winning the race was not enough in the minds of the voters to give the award to Graham Hill. They instead honoured sixth-placed Jackie Stewart.