Al Unser Jr was IndyCar royalty even before he won the 500, but as his newly published memoirs reveal, off track his life was spinning out of control. He tells Damien Smith how he has finally made peace with his past

Unser Jr hits rock bottom with his arrest in 2002

Ready to drink the milk for the first time after winning the Indy 500 on May 24, 1992. Wife Shelley and children Cody and Al III join the celebrations.

GETTY IMAGES, DAN BOYD

Little Al from Albuquerque: born into one of America’s great racing families, fresh-faced Unser Jr paid his dues in karting and sprint cars, then won titles in Super Vee and Can-Am. An overlooked all-rounder, he also shone in IMSA sports cars and IROC as his star rose in IndyCar

NOT TOO MANY MOTOR SPORT autobiographies begin with the protagonist pointing a gun at his own head with the genuine intention of pulling the trigger. Nothing about A Checkered Past is normal, especially in the context of straight-up and serious racing books. Then again, the same can be said of Al Unser Jr. Born into one of the great American motor sport families, ‘Little Al’ followed in the best traditions of his namesake father and uncle Bobby to become an IndyCar legend. But he also created a few less illustrious traditions all of his own, in a double life that was dominated and almost destroyed by drug addiction and alcoholism. Inside the IndyCar paddock, it was an open secret from early in his stunningly successful racing career that Unser Jr liked to “party”, as the Americans so quaintly put it. But it was only in the past 20 years that the two-time Indianapolis 500 winner’s life spiralled out of control and spilled into the public glare. Arrests for drink driving and domestic violence lifted the veil and shocked an IndyCar fanbase that places its heroes on high pedestals, as the life and career of an increasingly puffy-looking Junior dwindled into sad, sponsor-less obscurity. From drinking the milk at The Brickyard, winning a pair of IndyCar Series titles and 34 premier-class races, scoring back-to-back Daytona 24 Hours victories in Al Holbert’s Lowenbrau Porsche 962, beating NASCAR greats at their own game in IROC (twice) and even conquering Pikes Peak’s ‘Race to the Clouds’, by 2004 Little Al had been reduced to a bad joke. One that absolutely wasn’t funny.

“His arrests lifted the veil and shocked IndyCar fans”

But only now through his new book do we learn the depths he was brought to by an illness – and lest we forget that’s exactly what it is – that gripped him for four decades, even during his glory years of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Little Al lays it all out, describing in unflinching detail a tragic existence that cost him two marriages and left lasting and perhaps irreversible damage to his relationships with his four children. The book is packed full of fantastic racing stories too, offering all the insight you would hope and expect from his rich and varied career. But it’s the personal decay and destruction at the heart of this story that will linger most. It’s a brave and astonishing piece of work in its unflinching, brutal honesty.