Or, incredibly, is it Michael Andretti, son of Formula One World Champion Mario Andretti, and himself a CART champion in 1991 and in the running again this year for the CART Championship, who had a depressing not-quite-complete season in Grand Prix cars in 1993, and when it all went up in smoke, turned his McLaren-Ford over to then-test driver Mika Hakkinen who, it can now be said, spectacularly turned Andretti's loss into his gain? 

It all began for Michael in the whirlwind year of 1991, when he would win a record eight races in CART, be on pole eight times and ultimately be crowned CART Champion, and when he raced sports cars at the 24 hours of Daytona, reflecting his father's versatility. In other words: he was hot, like Juan Pablo Montoya is now, and as the 1992 season unfolded, the young Andretti was thinking about Formula One. Michael and his father Mario had contacts with both McLaren and Ferrari (Mario had driven for Ferrari in the early 1970s), but Michael ran in CART again in 1992 and the focus of his planning to switch to Formula One became the 1993 season. 

Meanwhile, over in Formula One, Ron Dennis at McLaren was having a difficult 1992 season on all levels: performance of the team was down, prospects for 1993 did not look promising since Honda had announced that it was exiting Formula One, and McLaren's star driver, Ayrton Senna, was making noises about packing it in at McLaren. Unlike today, when drivers would fall all over themselves to join McLaren, the Gold Standard of Formula One teams was in a bit of a shambles in 1992, after a long run at the top. For 1993, Williams had the best engine, the Renault, and everyone wanted to be there, including Senna, who could see that Ron Dennis and the team would be treading water come 1993, having lost Honda and its world-beating V12 engine. Senna is rumored to have offered to drive for free for Frank Williams but his archival, Frenchman Alain Prost, got the nod from engine supplier Renault over Senna. 

With Senna temporizing over whether he would sign up again with McLaren for 1993, Dennis was keen to lock in somebody of substance. By September 13th 1992, the height of the Silly Season at Monza, the announcement had come: Ron Dennis had dropped everything to venture forth to the wilds of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where he signed a contract with Michael Andretti to drive for McLaren in 1993, with a further two-year option if things worked out. Important issues like what engine the McLaren would use were still up in the air, as was Senna's situation. 

By December 1992, things were beginning to come together. McLaren had finished up the season strong; Berger had won the Australian Grand Prix at Adelaide, the last race of the season, and had placed second in the prior two races at Estoril and Suzuka. And Michael began his indoctrination, testing last year's McLaren-Honda V12 at Barcelona and at Paul Ricard, with mixed results. But also in late December 1992 came the bad news: Renault definitely would not be coming to McLaren. Instead, Ron Dennis was stuck with a Ford V-8 for Michael's rookie year, 1993, and it was a Ford customer engine one spec behind the one to be used by Michael Schumacher and Ricardo Patrese at Benetton-Ford. Dennis was so desperate during this period that he tried to buy the French Ligier team - the only other team that had the rights to use the Renault engine - but that stratagem also failed, because Ligier's sponsor Elf refused to step aside and let Ron's sponsor Shell pump the gas. 

When the dust settled, McLaren found itself in 1993 with the same arrangements Sauber has had with Ferrari these last few years, running the stepchild Ford engine. One positive ingredient in all this: McLaren would have the engineering benefit of its business partner, TAG electronics, which strengthened the McLaren-Ford package by tricking it up with the driver aids then permitted in Formula One: active suspension, semi-automatic transmissions and fly-by-wire throttle, where there is no direct mechanical link between the pedal and the engine.

Senna's antics, though, contributed to an uncertain December 1992. At the suggestion of fellow Brazilian Emerson Fittipaldi, Senna went to Phoenix to test Roger Penske's Indy car, signaling to Dennis that he was not the only fish in the sea. (And Senna had guessed right by the way as to what team to join; Emerson Fittipaldi would go on to win the Indy 500 for Marlboro-Penske in 1993.) Remember, this was a time of cross-pollination between Formula One and the Indycars, with Mansell jumping ship after winning the 1992 World Championship for Williams and taking Michael's seat at Newman/Haas, ultimately becoming the first rookie to win the CART championship in 1993. 

Enter Mika Hakkenin, who was leaving Lotus, and had also intended to go to Williams-Renault for 1993 but was blocked from doing so by the Lotus team manager, who controlled Mika's contract. In order to resolve Mika's situation and avoid a lawsuit, Keke Rosberg, Mika's manager, found Ron Dennis on vacation in December 1992 in the French Alps, explained Mika's quandary and set up a meeting between Mika and Dennis. As they say, the rest is history. 

With the first race of the 1993 season scheduled for Kyalami, South Africa, Ron Dennis covered his bets and brought on Mika Hakkinen to be either teammate to Michael Andretti or test driver for McLaren, depending on Senna's decision. Surely, Andretti had been through enough years in racing to see the danger signs in an atmosphere of such tumult: new engine (late to arrive, only a month before Kyalami), new drivers, and limited testing with the new package prior to Kyalami, but he was already committed to see it through. 

In the end, what went wrong? Was it Michael? Was it the McLaren-Ford? Was it the team showing favoritism to Senna? Or was it just colossal bad luck, Andretti-style, something that had also plagued both father and son at Indianapolis, where they have together led tons of laps but have only one win between them, Mario's, in 1969? 

The conventional wisdom is that Andretti's main mistake was that he did not take his commitment to Formula One seriously enough, that he kept criss-crossing the Atlantic on the Concorde after every race instead of hanging out at Woking with Ron Dennis, leaving Mika Hakkinen to do the testing, and robbing himself of seat time and cultural bonding with the team. There were also changes in regulations that year that limited testing, which worked against a newcomer like Andretti. These pat explanations for Michael's inexplicably horrendous performance are accepted as gospel in Formula One circles; they are found in books and can be heard from people at Formula One factories.

But these explanations simply do not wash and are mostly at odds with all we have seen from Andretti during his now long and distinguished CART career, where he has never been known as a slacker. And he did have family reasons at that time for wanting to stay close to home: Michael was by 1993 the father of two young children, 6 and 3, so presumably he wanted to be with them as much as possible, thus the infamous Concorde frequent flying. 

So what happened then? Was it just an early form of the Zanardi Experience, where a brilliant CART career just did not translate into a successful Formula One ride, because the cars were just too different or the driving techniques too dissimilar for quick adaptation? But if that were the case then what about Jacques Villeneuve, who won the Indy 500 and the CART Championship in 1995 and was winning Formula One races for Williams by 1996? And what of Mansell, who successfully made the same transition as Villeneuve but in reverse order? Can Michael be all that less talented than these two? 

In some ways, with the benefit of historical context and with more public knowledge today as to how Formula One teams actually operate, we may be in a better position to judge now what went wrong than was possible to do at the time these events were occurring in 1993. As Rubens Barrichello and David Coulthard have discovered, there is always a Team Leader and clearly Ayrton Senna, even in his same uncertain state as of 1993, would have been No. 1 at McLaren, based upon the phenomenal success he had brought to the team from 1988 through 1992. To be sure, Senna's itchiness to jump ship in 1993 would certainly have solidified his receiving preferential treatment from Ron Dennis and the team; by contrast, Michael was a distant second, a kid with a famous last name and a Championship in that lesser open-wheel series Across The Pond but certainly no Senna. 

Moreover, the McLaren-Ford, as feared by all concerned, was apparently no great shakes even in Senna's hands; Senna came back to McLaren on a race-to-race basis but managed to pull out wins only in Monaco (where he was a past master), at Donington (where his sheer spellbinding talent in the rain won the day), at his home race in Brazil (also in the rain), at Suzuka (again in the rain), and at Australia, his final race for McLaren and, significantly, McLaren's last win until Jerez in 1997. During the rest of the season, even Senna was outclassed by Alain Prost and Damon Hill in the Williams-Renault.

In short, a strong case can be made for the proposition that Michael was a backbencher on a team that was then in decline, running a year-old engine, and that was the most likely explanation for his lackluster season. Even if Michael had pitched a tent at the factory in Woking, it could not change the horrible truth: he had opted to join a great team that was having a bad year and that we now know was going to continue to flounder for a few more years to come. 

And the fact that Michael was dealt inferior equipment by McLaren took its toll as Michael's 13 unlucky races wore on. Michael's ignominious first race at Kyalami could be put down to the team's lack of preparation: in what should have been a triumphant return by Michael to the track where his father Mario had taken his first Grand Prix win for Ferrari in 1971, what Michael found when he attempted to start his very first race was that the clutch did not grab, a fairly fundamental mechanical problem. He stalled it, had to be pushed to the pits and began the race one lap in the hole. Hurrying to make up for his abysmal start, Michael went out on Lap 4, after hitting Derek Warwick, who was able to continue and finished seventh in the Footwork/Mugen-Honda. 

A man for one season. Part 2