At the top: a set of lightweight wheel hubs he deemed woefully inadequate. After an early-season shakedown, Brawner sent it back to Hethel with a list of no fewer than 138 things that needed fixing. Clint Brawner resisted the urge to say, “I told you so.” The 52-year-old chief mechanic had made plain his opinion of the four-wheel-drive Lotus 64 making its debut ahead of the 1969 Indianapolis 500: It was flimsy, overly complicated, diabolically packaged, “a terrible car,” as he put it in his 1975 memoir. At a time when such a crash quite often proved lethal, that Mario Andretti had gotten away with only some burns to his face bordered on the miraculous. Even at this grainy remove, it’s still startling, though, how quickly it happens: the car hitting the turn 4 wall and erupting into a fireball, shedding wheels and bodywork as it slides across the track toward the infield, not yet fully stopped when a figure in white improbably leaps from the wreckage and runs to the fence.
You can find the footage on YouTube, a faded Kodachrome snippet recalling the Zapruder film.
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