There was a marvellous story told recently on the Mohr Stories podcast, hosted by Jerry Maguire actor Jay Mohr, which involved Hollywood legend Burt Reynolds getting into a bar fight.

The story goes that sometime in the early 1970s, Reynolds, then the biggest movie star on the planet, was at a Midtown club in Manhattan, living it up with “the entire offensive line of the New York Jets”. They were having a grand old time until Reynolds looked over at the table next to theirs and noticed what he described as a “f------ greaseball” sitting there with “four of the hottest babes he had ever seen in his life”.

According to actor and comedian Jay Chandrasekhar – who said Reynolds personally told him this story some years ago – the macho Hollywood icon became jealous. “I’m Burt Reynolds,” he thought. “The biggest star in the goddamn world. And this f------ guinea greaseball motherf----- is sitting there with all these women!” So Reynolds went over and started flirting with the girls, only for the greaseball in question to take umbrage and start “chirping” at him.

“So I’m like, ‘You wanna go outside?’” Reynolds said. “And he’s like, ‘Yeah, I do’. And it’s like February in New York, right? It’s like 20 degrees [-7C]. And we’re circling each other in the street. And when this dude hits me, I go, ‘Oh no’. Because his punch is so strong, right? But I’m Burt Reynolds. So I f------ drill this guy. And we’re just drilling each other. And I’m so impressed with his punch that after about two minutes, maybe a minute and a half, I’m like, ‘Can we take a break?’ And the guy goes, ‘Yeah, let’s take a break’. And I reach over and I shake his hand and I’m like, ‘Hey, I’m Burt Reynolds’. And the guy goes… ‘I’m Mario Andretti’.”

Mario Andretti laughs when I ask him whether it is true that he once beat Reynolds in a bar fight. “I think I was a little faster than him,” he says, modestly. “But yeah…I beat him up! We had a beer together later.”

It is an incredible tale, but the best thing about it is that Andretti has never told it before. The only reason I even asked was that I heard it on a podcast. It sums the man up. Andretti has won pretty much everything there is to win in motorsport. He remains the only person alive to have won the F1 world title (1978), the Indianapolis 500 (1969), and the Daytona 500 (1967). He has been Champ Car champion (four times) and USAC dirt champion. He has been voted Greatest American Driver Ever. But he remains as modest and unassuming off the track as he was competitive on it.

Now 86, and still sharp as a tack, Andretti is talking to me via Zoom from his home in Nazareth, the small Pennsylvania town where he fetched up as a 15-year-old immigrant in 1955. He could afford to live anywhere from Malibu to Miami – and he does own other properties scattered about the country. But despite his fame and wealth, Andretti has always stayed true to the place he met his wife Dee Ann (when she was teaching him English in 1961), where he raised his family and where he began his racing career on the local dirt tracks alongside twin brother Aldo. “It’s funny, I’m the only one in the family that actually remained here,” he says.

We are speaking before the United States Grand Prix in Austin, which Andretti will be attending in his capacity as an ambassador for the grid’s newcomers, Cadillac F1. He is looking forward to it. Cadillac are still some way off being competitive, but Andretti is confident they will get there eventually. “We’d like to see more progress, obviously,” he says. “Everyone in the team does. But you have to be realistic. There’s so much infrastructure required to be a successful F1 team. It’s coming though. You only have to see the passion from everyone at General Motors (GM), the team’s backers and Cadillac.”

Much of Andretti’s optimism stems from F1’s extraordinary rise in popularity in the States. Austin, for a long time the only race in the US, is now one of three, along with Miami and Las Vegas, and there is talk of a fourth. It should come as no surprise. F1’s owner, Liberty Media, is American. Netflix, which has been responsible for boosting the sport’s popularity with its Drive to Survive series, is American. A Hollywood film, F1, starring Brad Pitt was released last year. These are heady times for a sport which for decades tried and failed to gain a foothold on the other side of the pond. “I’m as surprised as anyone,” Andretti admits. “I never, ever thought it would take off like this. It’s phenomenal. You have to give credit to Drive to Survive, it just awakened something. But it’s wonderful. For someone like me, who has been in the business for so long, you almost have to pinch yourself.”

Andretti has certainly done his bit to boost the popularity of motorsport Stateside. And against incredible odds as well. To anyone who knows his family story, it will come as no surprise that Reynolds met his match in that New York bar. Andretti had to scrap almost his entire life to make it. Born in 1940 to an Istrian-Italian family in Montona, a part of Italy which was ceded to Yugoslavia post-war, his father chose to join the mass exodus from the region in 1948 rather than live under the hardline regime of Marshal Tito. For seven years the Andrettis lived in a refugee camp in Lucca, billeted in an old monastery, one of 10 families in a single room, without any running water, separated by blankets which they strung up between them. Andretti credits his father with ensuring that he and his siblings – older sister Anna Maria and his twin Aldo – were always properly dressed, warm and fed. “[But] the feeling of being unwelcome in Lucca and being treated like gypsies was very real,” Andretti recalled in a moving letter he once wrote to his younger self for The Players’ Tribune.

It was during this period that Mario and Aldo became fascinated with motor racing. They would cycle to watch the Mille Miglia pass through the region. They even made it to the Italian Grand Prix at Monza one year, where they saw their idol Alberto Ascari racing for Ferrari. When they finally made it to America in 1955, after years of waiting for visas, Andretti did not speak a word of English and admitted he wanted nothing more than to head back to Italy. But within a year he and Aldo were building their first race car together, a 1948 Hudson Hornet, which they converted into a stock car. Little did the brothers know then that Andretti would be back at Monza 20 years later, winning the Italian Grand Prix in 1977, or that he would be confirmed as America’s second F1 champion the following year after one of the sport’s great tragedies: the death of his Lotus team-mate and close friend Ronnie Peterson. In that same letter to himself, he said he would gladly have traded the title to have his friend back.

Andretti’s career, and just how much he packed into it, is mind-boggling. Never mind Formula One. He raced stock cars, sports cars, NASCAR, Can-Am. He was a pure racer. And he never stopped. He did Le Mans in 2000, and in 2003, at the age of 63, he lapped Indy at 225mph. Driving for his son Michael’s Andretti Green Racing team, his car hit debris and went airborne at more than 200mph before landing upright. He walked away with only a minor scratch on his chin. “I derived tremendous satisfaction out of doing something that wasn’t my speciality,” he said of his prolific career. “And not just race, but win, in somebody else’s sandbox, with different rules! Even my wife used to say ‘Mario, do you really have to do all that?’ But I wouldn’t have been happy otherwise.”

As we speak, I can see mementos from his extraordinary life. Books, pictures, miniature cars. On the wall behind him is a painting of the John Player Special-liveried black Lotus in which he won his 1978 title. A pen pot holds two flags – one American, one Italian. “It was different times,” he says of F1 back then. “We had more fun. I remember lying around the pool at Kyalami [South Africa] one year, taking bets, who can trip the gentleman that’s coming over with the drinks, you know? Just silly stuff. But there was real camaraderie between us. With all the seriousness and danger there was then, you had to let loose.”

One man known for doing exactly that will be remembered this weekend. It is the 50th anniversary of James Hunt’s world title. As luck would have it, it was Andretti who won that rain-soaked race at Fuji in 1976 when the swashbuckling Briton was crowned champion after rival Niki Lauda retired his car. “It was an incredible weekend,” Andretti recalls. “Niki had just come back after his accident at the Nürburgring, and the conditions were as bad as they could possibly have been for him given his issues with his [fire-damaged tear ducts]. It was very, very intelligent... very smart of him to pull in and be done with it. I had so much admiration for what he did even to come back so quickly.

“But for me, and for us as a team, it was a very significant win. I remember afterwards, Colin [Lotus boss Colin Chapman] made a statement to me that I’ll never forget. He said: ‘Mario, next year’s car will make this one look like a London bus.’ That was prophetic, because things started happening the following year.”

And Hunt? Andretti smiles. “Oh, we got on pretty well,” he says. “We had our moments. I remember in Zandvoort one year he blamed me for a crash at Tarzan corner after I tried to pass him on the outside and he pushed me off, and then we took each other out when I came back on. He said, ‘You don’t do that in Formula One!’ And I said ‘Well, I’ve never heard of that one!’ It’s funny, the year after he retired and became a commentator, I passed Carlos Reutemann on the outside at the exact same corner and he said ‘Oh, I guess that is possible! I take it back.’

“But you know, James was a great character. You could never stay mad at him. And he was a force to be reckoned with on the track. He had tremendous talent, and his record speaks for itself.”

Andretti has to go. He admits there are a few things he would change about modern F1. A return to normally aspirated V8s for one thing. “That was like motor racing opera,” he says. “The sound, whether you like it or not, is at least a part of the excitement of the sport of motor racing. The fans have to vibrate!”

Most of all, though, he would like to see a young American, ideally driving for an American team, winning races, following in his footsteps. Is it too difficult for young Americans coming through, I ask, what with the super-licence requirements, and the feeder series and infrastructure so centred in Europe? Andretti contemplates the question. “Yeah, certain aspects,” he says. “But for me, it’s all about willpower. If you really want it, you make it happen.” No one epitomised that fierce will more than Mario Andretti.

As Burt Reynolds found out on a cold February night all those years ago.