In American open-wheel racing, Fittipaldi won the IndyCar World Series in 1989 with Patrick, and is a two-time winner of the Indianapolis 500.

Moving up from Formula Two, Fittipaldi made his race debut for Team Lotus as a third driver at the 1970 British Grand Prix.

He surprised the paddock by moving to his brother's Fittipaldi Automotive team prior to the 1976 season, being replaced by James Hunt.

Success eluded him during his final years in Formula One, with the Fittipaldi cars not competitive enough to fight for victories.

[1] He is the younger son of prominent Italian-Brazilian motorsports journalist and radio commentator Wilson Fittipaldi Sr[2] and his wife Józefa "Juzy" Wojciechowska, an immigrant from Saint Petersburg of Polish and Russian descent.

With six finishes in the points and four on the podium, he ended the eight-race season in third place behind Clay Regazzoni and Derek Bell.

Team Lotus plans for the season drastically changed when Jochen Rindt was killed at Monza in September and became the only driver to win the championship posthumously.

1 driver on his fifth F1 race at the United States GP with Reine Wisell and Pete Lovely as the teammates.

Armed with what was arguably the greatest Formula one design of all time, the Lotus 72D, Fittipaldi proved dominant in 1972 as he won five of 11 races and claimed the F1 Drivers' Championship.

Driving the highly efficient McLaren M23, he had three victories in 1974, reached the podium four other times, and beat out Clay Regazzoni in a close battle for his second championship.

He has since said that his last two years in Formula One were very unhappy: "I was too involved in the problems of trying to make the team work, and I neglected my marriage and my personal life",[6] although at the time he cited the deaths of many of his colleagues as his reason.

He had failed to finish seven of the last ten races that year and had several times been outpaced by his Finnish teammate Keke Rosberg (a future champion himself).

He spent his first season acclimatising to IndyCars, driving for two teams before joining Patrick Racing as a replacement for Chip Ganassi, who had been seriously injured in the 1984 Michigan 500.

But for bad luck he might have won three consecutive Indianapolis 500s, suffering blistered tires in 1990 and a gearbox failure in 1991, both while leading.

In 1993 he added a second Indianapolis 500 victory by taking the lead from reigning Formula One World Champion Nigel Mansell on lap 185 and holding it for the remainder.

[13] As a result of drinking the juice, Fittipaldi forfeited $5,000 from the winner's purse and publicly apologized to the American Dairy Association.

[14] Fan reaction to the milk snub was highly negative, and he was booed a week later at Milwaukee, a center of the American dairy industry.

[15] In May 1994, Fittipaldi skipped a practice session for the Indianapolis 500 after his close friend Ayrton Senna, also a native of Brazil and a former Formula One champion, died in a crash.

Fittipaldi was one of the pallbearers during Senna's funeral, alongside Jackie Stewart, Alain Prost and several other F1 world champions.

[18] In 2005 Fittipaldi made a surprise return to competitive racing in the Grand Prix Masters event held at Kyalami in South Africa, finishing second behind fellow F1 driver Nigel Mansell.

[19] In 2008, Emerson and his brother Wilson entered the Brazilian GT3 Championship, driving a Porsche 997 GT3 for the WB Motorsports team.

[23] In early December 2012, Fittipaldi married economist Rossana Fanucchi in São Paulo after a partnership of eleven years.

In September 1997, while recovering from injuries in a crash at Michigan International Speedway a year earlier, he was flying his private plane across his orange tree farm in the state of São Paulo.

[34] In August 2022, Fittipaldi announced his candidacy for the Italian Senate, representing the South American overseas constituency, running as a member of the Brothers of Italy political party,[35] being eventually defeated by Italo-Argentine Mario Borghese a month later in the 2022 Italian parliamentary elections.