Mears admits he learned some tough lessons from having Bobby Unser as a teammate, but those lessons made him a better race car driver.
“Bobby made the comment, ‘I wasn’t put on this earth to make Rick Mears go fast.’ That is the way Bobby looked at that and I have every bit of respect for that,” Mears explained. “To this day he’ll say, ‘I taught Rick Mears all he knows.’ I still tell him he’s taught me more than he knows. By him being the way he was as far as a team player, he taught me how to read between the lines.
“He taught me how to keep my mouth shut and my eyes and ears open and learn that way,” Mears noted. “It also wasn’t all his doing because I had my own pride and my own ego and I wanted to do it all on my own. If I could beat Bobby without his help, it was much more gratifying to me. That is why I wouldn’t ask the question. I would rather listen and try to learn that way and not give Bobby the satisfaction of telling me how to do something.
“We played our games like that, but he was a team player to a point and quite a bit of a team player for him,” Mears continued. “I never had any qualms with Bobby. He helped me get into Indy cars in the early years. He helped show me around tracks in rental cars and show me how to do it and what to do. I met him at Pikes Peak and raced a lot with him there. Bobby and I are great friends and we laugh about the teammate business, but we get along very well. We worked well as a team, just not as much on the technical end of it.”
Before the Unsers could experience tremendous joy, they had to suffer bitter personal loss.
“The speedway could have kicked my butt and finished me like my brother Jerry,” Bobby Unser admitted. “If I had not gotten my foot in the door, Al may not have had a chance. Indianapolis was always good to us. It offered opportunity and then we had to work on it and make it work. Then ‘Little Al’ came along and if it hadn’t been for his personal problems, he could have won the most of them all.”
Bobby Unser has never been a man of few words, but even he has a hard time properly explaining the family’s success at Indianapolis.
“If the Good Lord hadn’t said these things were going to happen there was no logical way you could predict these things would happen,” he said. “The end result is nine wins — nine wins. That’s unheard of.
“One of the biggest things that ever happened was one family winning the Indianapolis 500 nine times. That’s what made the Unser family what we were.”
That is why even at his advanced age, Unser makes the annual trip to Indianapolis Motor Speedway for the Month of May.
“When Doug Boles came in and started running the speedway, everything changed at Indianapolis for Bobby Unser and the other drivers,” Unser said of the current IMS president. “I really like going back there. I really like seeing my friends that I’ve known for many years. They are like family. I hold that dear to my heart.
“I don’t know any of the new drivers, but I did what they are trying to do now.
“I always knew how fortunate I was, but I didn’t know until this year how much Bobby Unser means to the fans.”