CAN MARIO ANDRETTI CONQUER F1...AGAIN?

He's the last American to win the Formula 1 World Championship. That was 44 years ago. Now, as race fans in the U.S. catch the F1 bug for the first time, Mario Andretti and his son Michael are desperately trying to put the family name back on top of the sport.

- DANIEL RILEY

1. MIAMI

In the paddock at the Miami Grand Prix, stars of Formula 1 and stars of American life who have recently caught the Formula 1 bug pass one another at close proximity and at great speed. There goes the British seven-time World Champion Lewis Hamilton on his Mercedes scooter. There goes Japanese driver Yuki Tsunoda, taller than a third grader but sipping from a juice box nonetheless. Teams dressed in red flow this way, teams wearing white that way, looking like the lights on a highway.

Privileged patrons—among them Michelle Obama and LeBron James, Venus and Serena Williams, Michael Douglas and George Lucas, Americans all, some old fans, others new to the sport—scrum amid the mounting traffic and marvel that the great F1 circus has descended upon not just any part of America, but this America, for the first-ever Miami Grand Prix, just as interest has peaked among a burgeoning American race fan.

If you look past them all, past Patrick Mahomes and Josh Allen, beyond Bad Bunny and Pharrell, over the hip-high hedges of the team hospitality suites, around the fake palm fronds, and just beside those Ferrari mechanics sipping espressos in the 34-degree swamp heat, you’ll find a diminutive, olive-skinned man sitting in the middle of it all, an American, who has, it turns out, been around these F1 parts for decades, but is just now working out a more permanent return.