On Aug. 6 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Marco Andretti of the Verizon IndyCar Series and Dani Pedrosa of MotoGP piloted their respective race crafts in an exhibition lap around the road course.

After the lap, Andretti joked that though his contract with Andretti Autosport didn’t allow motorcycling, he’d love to take Pedrosa’s state-of-the-art Repsol Honda for a spin.

He wouldn’t have been the first Andretti to take a crack at two wheels. His father and grandfather did.

Mario Andretti turned three laps on Eddie Lawson’s Team Roberts 500cc Yamaha YZR500 during a break at the 1991 Indy car event at Laguna Seca.

"Great! Fantastic!" Mario told IndyCar Racing magazine after pushing Lawson's No. 16 Yamaha hard around the 2.2-mile track. "You really had to control the throttle. The slightest hiccup and you had the front wheel off the ground. A real man's machine."

Eleven years later, Michael Andretti jumped on a bike at Mid-Ohio. Nicky Hayden, “The Kentucky Kid,” was an AMA Superbike rider in 2002 and swapped his Honda RC-51 Superbike with Andretti’s Motorola Honda Indy car.

“I've never been on a track on a bike," Andretti said while putting on leathers in the Mid-Ohio pits. "When I shift, is it like the car? I don't have to lift?"

According to a Motor Trend story, Andretti’s times dropped from lap to lap as he got more comfortable, with his best effort of 1 minute, 44 seconds coming in 17 seconds behind the seasoned Hayden’s best.

Hayden, for his part, also proved a quick learner on four wheels, dropping his lap times by nine seconds from the first lap to the last. Alas, his best was 1 minute, 30 seconds, some 24 seconds slower than Michael.

The regulars, of course, were far better than the amateurs in their respective disciplines. But the fun was in trying.