The go-to example of Michael’s failings involves maintaining his family residence in Nazareth, Pennsylvania. Rather than uproot his young family for Europe in order to be close to McLaren’s U.K. factory, and most of the F1 races on the schedule, Andretti chose a steady diet of trans-Atlantic flights.
Still today, the decision to commute is consistently cited as an indictment of Andretti’s character.
“It wouldn’t have done anything,” he says. “No, it wouldn’t have done one thing. People are clueless. Me even being there–first of all, when I was there [at McLaren], they’re like ‘okay, you guys need to leave,’ when I was at the shop, you know? Then so what was I going to do? Twiddle my thumbs? I never got off the time zone when I’d be there… thank God for the Concorde because I could be there in, door-to-door, six hours.
“It was like, shit, takes you that long [driving] from Monaco, so it was no problem there. I just laugh when I see people [make this claim]. They’re just so clueless. But they just loved using that. That’s the excuse
