How Roger and Mario Broke the Indy 500 — (Penske “Beast” V-8, 1994)

To borrow a line from this episode, “this is a great story because it’s got Paul Tracy melting his feet off and a bunch of stuff blowing up and Mario Andretti sits on his porch giving the stink eye at one point.”

(The Mario in the headline is a different Mario. Headline Mario was Swiss.)

(Digression: Headline Mario sounds like the *worst* Nintendo game. “Hey, Timmy! Come by my house after school! We can play Headline Mario and eat Cheez-Its!”)

(Timmy: “Uh . . . I have to . . . wash my hair?”)

(What would that game even be, really? Like, Mario and Luigi save the world from a giant jerky turtle monster by doing… journalism? What would the spinoffs look like? “You guys! I got the red shell in Headline Mario Kart! Now I can murder another kart with a single split infinitive!”)

(I should probably be telling you what’s in this episode, right? Ah well, too late, we’ve used up too much space already. It’s a corker, though, I promise.)

This show’s format rotates weekly, because squirrel. This episode is our monthly deep dive into an epic moment from racing history—in this case, the top-secret, hyper-rad moonshot project that three very clever men built to absolutely destroy the 1994 Indianapolis 500.

The cool part: They actually got away with it!

Related Trivia: Did we mention that SAM HAS A NEW BOOK OUT? It’s called “Smithology.” Available now on Amazon in print and as a Kindle e-book. It is far better written than the episode descriptions for this show. Though that's admittedly not saying much.)

This episode was produced by Mike Perlman.

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ABOUT THE SHOW:

It’s Not the Car is a podcast about people and speed. We tell racing stories and leave out the boring parts.

Ross Bentley is a former IndyCar driver and an internationally renowned performance coach and author. Jeff Braun is a championship-winning race engineer. Sam Smith is an award-winning journalist and a former executive editor of Road & Track magazine. Together, we explore the emotion at the heart of the machine.

We don’t love racing for the nuts and bolts—we love it for what it asks of the bag of meat at the wheel.

New episodes every Tuesday.