Racing legend A.J. Foyt is one of the all-time Texas tough guys, perhaps because he had to be.
He nearly drowned in Galveston Bay as a teenager, saved only by the life jacket that protected him that January afternoon. His friend perished without one.
In racing, Foyt was blue in the face while suffocating on dirt from a 1965 stock car crash in Riverside, Calif., when a track doctor prematurely pronounced him dead. The next year, Foyt nearly burned to death in an Indy-car accident in Milwaukee.
Somehow Foyt survived the dangerous era of the sport and made it to his 50th anniversary in Indy-car racing.
In 1990, the four-time Indianapolis 500 winner literally had to be dug out of a wooded embankment after his feet and legs were pulverized in a gruesome Indy-car crash at Elkhart Lake, Wis. Two years ago, a swarm of African killer bees nearly stung him to death as he worked one of his Texas ranches. He survived by burying his face in a muddy pit filled with fire ants. Sometimes he wonders how he’s still standing.
“I figure when your time’s up, it’s up,” he said. “I’ve been lucky.”
Like that day at Riverside when his stock car, which had lost its brakes, flipped off the track. His breastbone got ripped apart, but his aorta, miraculously, was only bruised, not punctured.
Foyt only limps and aches from the Elkhart Lake disaster, and he can at least use the right arm that was mangled by a guard rail in a crash at Michigan in 1981.
Curtailing his desire to consume butter and ice cream has been tough. Since heart surgery in 2000, he still eats too much of both.
Foyt might be a collection of screws, stents, pins and plates, but his racing spirit remains intact. That explains why he is eager to get another Indy-car season started with this weekend’s race in Homestead, Fla.
Foyt owns the No.14 car to be driven by Darren Manning. He will be calling the shots on the radio, feisty and animated as usual.
“I’m the same as I’ve always been,” he said. “I’m just not as active as I used to be because I’m too damn crippled up.”
Texas roots
Foyt was raised in Houston, where he drove his first midget at age 6. He first witnessed the emotions of Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1955.
Foyt attended that race as a fan, sitting in the second-turn grandstand with a racing friend from Texas. Bill Vukovich was on his way to what would have been an unprecedented third consecutive 500 when his car inexplicably veered off the second turn and flipped over the backstretch’s outside wall. Vukovich was killed.
Foyt saw it happen.
“A terrible crash,” he said.
Foyt arrived at Indy for the first time as a competitor in 1958, but race officials denied him credentials. They wanted to his see his car first.
“I stood outside the fence,” he said of the memory. “I’ll never forget that.”
Still, Foyt’s road to greatness was swift and sure. He won the first of his four 500s in 1961, his second in 1964. In the latter year, he won all 10 of the Indy-car races he completed – there were 13 in all – for his fourth championship in five years.
For the next two decades there was no one consistently better. In 1965, Foyt won the pole at Milwaukee with a dirt car against a field of new-style rear-engine cars. He recovered from the Milwaukee fire in ’66 to win nearly everything the next year: the 500, the 24 Hours of LeMans and his fifth Indy-car title.
“He could win in any kind of car,” said Johnny Rutherford, a contemporary. “And he wouldn’t accept anything less than that.”
Foyt won his fourth 500 in 1977 in glamorous style, inviting an ailing friend, track owner Tony Hulman, to ride in the pace car around the track after the race.
That proved symbolic: Both were near the end of their runs. Foyt won only four more races as a driver; Hulman died five months later.
“I put my arm around him (in the pace car), and that’s when I realized how much weight he had lost,” Foyt said. “He was really going downhill.”
Final role
Foyt’s final victory as a driver came in Pocono, Pa., in 1981, and his final Indy-car race, the 369th of his career, came in the 1992 500.
While he competed in Indy’s inaugural Brickyard 400 in 1994, his successful NASCAR career – he was the 1972 Daytona 500 winner – ended before the sport became popular nationally.
Even Foyt’s best days as a team owner were mostly out of the public eye. His team’s Indy Racing League championship in 1998 and the 500 victory the next year – both with Kenny Brack as the driver – came in the fledgling days of the series.
Since a number of larger race teams arrived in the IRL in 2003 from the series now known as Champ Car, Foyt’s team has seen only one top-five finish, although admittedly it has been slowed by inexperienced drivers and, for a time, Toyota’s inferior engine.
A proud Texan, Foyt has no regrets and, while he’d love to drive a race car again, he focuses only on the challenges ahead.
Part of his peace of mind is the road he has traveled. He drove for his father, and a son and grandson have driven for him. He was a star of Indy-car racing’s glory days and earned unthinkable fame and wealth.
Fifty years in the sport allowed him to experience the changes, too. One of them was whistling around Indy at 221 mph, a speed he reached with a lap in practice just prior to his surprise retirement on pole day, May 15, 1993.
Foyt first qualified for the 500 at 143 mph. He won on straightaways of brick and pavement, and he drove front-engine roadsters and rear-engine cars with equal skill and flair.
“If somebody would have ever told me I would have run around (Indy) wide open and I’d live … I mean, it’s hard for me to believe,” he said. “I’m glad I lived long enough to feel that in these cars.”
