What I'd Do Differently: Al Unser Jr.
The hard-driving and (formerly) harddrinking, two-time CART Series and Indy 500 champ, 48, settles into life outside the cockpit and the bottle. But he's still deep inside the racing biz.
INTERVIEW
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C/D: You are involved in several things, including charities, but your day job is working for IndyCar.
AU: Yeah, I’m kind of following in my dad’s footsteps. Like he was, I’m a driver coach for the Indy Racing League—I help the rookies, the Indy Lights drivers, and during the races, I’m in race control helping officiate the race.
C/D: You have 34 open-wheel victories—31 in CART, three in IndyCar—you saw the breakup between CART and the IRL up close, and you’ve seen the reconciliation up close. What’s the state of open-wheel racing in North America?
AU: Extremely healthy. There’s that conflict in Indianapolis with Tony George and his family—everyone knows that—but with Izod coming on board as the series sponsor, they’ve really taken the series up a couple of notches. It’s the first time the IRL has had a series sponsor that can really execute and activate the marketing.
C/D: Plenty of people thought that when Champ Car and the IRL joined forces, open-wheel racing would improve overnight. It didn’t.
AU: A lot of damage had been done. It was a divorce, then a reconciliation, but the things said in a divorce, you can’t take back. We had a strong fan base, and we divided them up. It’s going to take a while to get the fan base back together.
C/D: Do we need more U.S. drivers in IndyCar? And does it really matter?
AU: I don't know if it matters that much. Because we race on road courses, IndyCar is going to attract European drivers the same way CART and Champ Car did. Champ Car became a steppingstone to F1, and I think IndyCar will be, too. Which is a very good thing.
C/D: Any plans to race again?
AU: None right now. If I could do something to help my son [Al Unser III]’s career, where he and I could team up with somebody for, say, the 24 Hours of Daytona, yeah, I would want to do that. I’m still young enough, still love racing. At the IndyCar level? Definitely not. That takes a full-on commitment.
C/D: And how are you doing?
AU: Everything is really good with me. I’m sober.
C/D: What you went through would have been hard enough in private. But in public: the arrest in 2002 for supposedly striking Gina, your girlfriend—now your wife—on the way home from a strip club, then leaving her by the side of the road; the DUI in 2007. Playing all that out in the public eye is hard to imagine.
AU: At first, it truly bothered me to think that there might be some kid out there, and maybe I was his hero, and I messed that up. But I look back now, and I see it was the journey God wanted me to take. For whatever reason, I was chosen to tell my story in public, and now the message is: If I can quit drinking, so can you. One day at a time. I’d start thinking about it—I can’t have a drink next week? Next month? For the rest of my life? And that would take me back to the bottle. Then I started to think of it as one day at a time, and it’s been more than three and a half years.
C/D: Did you drink when you were depressed?
AU: Just the opposite. Win a race, you spray champagne. Birthday parties, weddings, anniversaries—they are all happy [events], and you drink. You lose a family member, or someone gets into an accident, you don’t go to the hospital and have a drink.
C/D: If you had it to do over again . . .
AU: Oh, gosh, there’s so much I would have done different, so much I wouldn’t change at all. God gave me a gift to be able to drive race cars, and I accomplished everything I ever dreamed of. Because of the journey I did go on, the challenges, the adversity after my success, it has made me a better person. Now I hope to inspire. Share my story. I wouldn’t want anybody to take the road I took, but I wish everyone could be where I am now. I appreciate every day. When I was younger, I didn’t—I just thought, “Yeah, good things are supposed to happen.”
C/D: No regrets career-wise? Not wishing you’d seriously gone after an F1 career?
AU: I dreamed of the Indy 500 when I was a kid. I mean, look at my family—my dad and my uncle, that’s where they were. I dreamed of racing in the majors—the Indy 500, Daytona, the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the F1 race at Monte Carlo. The Indy 500 and the 24 Hours of Daytona, I got ’em. I raced in the Daytona 500. Le Mans? That is still on the table, and you never know. But Monte Carlo? That’ll never happen.
C/D: I have a Monte Carlo you can drive. Would that help?
AU: No.
Thanks a lot for great info!!!
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