Unser is the name of America's most distinguished auto-racing family. Brothers Bobby and Al can lay claim to six Indianapolis 500 wins, as well as five national championships. Now comes another Unser, 23-year-old Al, Jr., known as Little Al and rated by many as the best racing Unser yet--despite losing last season's National crown to his dad in the closest contest ever. Peter Manso met with father and son in their native Albuquerque to talk about love, rivalry and racing.

Q 1

PLAYBOY: For years, the press tried to pit the Unser brothers against each other, especially after Bobby won the Indy 500 first. The same thing happened again last season, while you two were battling it out for the national championship. What does this sort of public provocation do to the family?

Al Unser, Sr.: If anything, it's brought us closer. Until Bobby and I got to be front runners, we never discussed it, but then we realized we had to be very careful about how we talked about each other. Reporters wanted to write that Al and I were going to be upset with each other, whoever won the title, but that just didn't happen. If it had been Al instead of me, I would have been just as happy. I couldn't lose either way, see, and going into the season's finale at Tamiami, the race that would decide the championship, I was probably more relaxed than I've ever been.

Al Unser, Jr.: Me, I was a nervous wreck. I had a chance to win an Indy Car championship, which is something I've dreamed about all my life. But pressure from the press wasn't what was getting to me. Nobody put any pressure on me except myself.

Al Unser, Sr.: You can always say, "Didn't you want to win?" Yes, I did, but Al was the only one who could beat me, so there was nothing to lose. One way or another, the title was going to belong to an Unser.

Q 2

PLAYBOY: Still, didn't you have conflicting instincts as a racer and as a father? Having beaten Little Al for the championship, you virtually cried on national television, apologizing, "I'm a racer."

Al Unser, Sr.: Well, it came down to whether I should give it to him or race as a racer, and I did what I had to. As a father, I told myself many times afterward that I should have backed off; but when I was in that race car, I couldn't. It was very, very hard--I mean, when I pulled alongside him on the cool-off lap, I wanted to tell him I was sorry. He applauded me. I tried to thank him, but as a father, I knew I had taken something from my son that I could very easily have given to him. And I didn't. So where is the line? There isn't one. I'm a racer. I couldn't give it to him.

Al Unser, Jr.: For Dad to have backed off and then afterward said, "I tried my best and Al earned it" would have been totally false, and there have never been any false feelings between us. Was I disappointed? Sure, I'm not going to lie about it. When I got out of the car and was walking toward Victory Circle, I didn't smile. But the first time I saw Dad, I was very, very happy. It seemed like an eternity before I could hug him. Our whole family is very close, see, and you earn everything you get, just like you give nothing.

Q 3

PLAYBOY: Let's go back to Little Al's apprenticeship. Would you have had a sense of disappointment if he hadn't wanted to follow in his father's footsteps?

Al Unser, Sr.: Mario Andretti and I talked about it years ago, just as I discussed it with Parnelli Jones, and neither of them wanted his kids to be race drivers. That was never my position. I started Al when he was nine, and I knew that if he didn't want to race, I'd pick up on that: but until then, I was going to push him. He was a little kid; he didn't know what he wanted to do. By 16, though, he was driving 600-horsepower sprint cars, and you could tell that he really had it.

Al Unser, Jr.: It's true; Dad made it clear that I didn't have to be a race driver. I had run half the season and crashed a couple of times, started to learn what racing's all about, and Dad sat me down and said he didn't care what I did as long as I put my best effort into it. After that, it was really my choice.

Al Unser, Sr.: Everybody was saying, "He's going to blow your ass off." I was coming back with, "I hope he does," but for me, the question was simple: whether he had the ability. It did occur to me that maybe I was pushing him too hard. Driving sprint cars was a very serious step up from the go-carts he'd been driving, and I was putting my boy's life on the line. If you make a mistake, sprint cars bite very hard. Besides which, there were a number of guys out there ganging up on him, wanting to show that the Unser kid wasn't worth shit. I didn't go to the races for a while.

Al Unser, Jr.: Driving sprint cars is dog-eat-dog racing. I found that out my first night. I started dead last and saw that I could get by two guys down the backstretch, only there was this third car I'd never seen on the outside of them, spinning, and it came shooting across the track as I was passing underneath: It caught my rear tire, and the back end of the car just went straight up in the air a good six feet. I came down upright but should have done a couple of barrel rolls. It probably put Dad right through the roof. Afterward, he asked, "Are you OK?" I said, "Yeah, why?"

Q 4

PLAYBOY: You never felt that you had to measure up? You've been quoted, not once but often, as referring to your father as your idol.

Al Unser, Jr.: Along with Andretti and A. J. Foyt and Johnny Rutherford and Gordy Johncock. There's no difference in my admiration for these guys and my dad. Last year at Phoenix, when I came in second to Dad, that was the proudest day of my life. It was a one-two Unser finish, the first time anything like that had happened, and if it had been me who came in first, I would have felt the same way. I'm not competing against Dad. I tried my best to knock him off at Tamiami for the championship, but it wasn't my dad I was after--it was that Pennzoil car number five that he happened to be driving.

Q 5

PLAYBOY: But in the midst of all the enthusiasm for racing, was there any emphasis on a formal education?

Al Unser, Sr.: That was a problem. Al was going to finish high school whatever he did. But the problem was made worse because I was gone all the time with my own racing, and he was a boy who could finagle and connive. Eventually, he got grounded, which meant he couldn't come back to the race track until he straightened out his grades.

Al Unser, Jr.: I'd sit in school thinking, This isn't going to get me around a race track any quicker, so I ditched as many days of school as I could. I'd be with my buddies out on the mesa, running cars into the ground, driving 'em, beating 'em up, putting 'em sideways. See, I really didn't have an adolescence. From 16, I went to 25; from go-carts, I went into an adult world; and I think I saw something in high school that a lot of people didn't see--namely, that I wasn't going to be there forever and what I wanted to do was totally different from what they were trying to teach me. Racing isn't your eight-hour-a-day, five-day-a-week job; and as for the pressures of racing, there was no way they could even think of explaining that to you.