American race car driver with the longest winning record in the Indianapolis 500. The only man ever to win the Indy 500, the Daytona 500 stock car race and the 24 hours of Le Mans, Foyt’s courage, stamina and skill have made him a legend in his own time with 172 major victories. He ran in 35 consecutive 500s from 1958 through 1992.
Making his first entrance into the winners’ circle at age five, Anthony Joseph Foyt raced a car built by his mechanic father and beat an adult in an exhibition race at the Houston Speed Bowl. “It was a setup deal, but it was my first taste of victory. All the races and all the money and all the fame have not dulled that desire to win one bit.” Pressing forward, he received his first injury at age 11 while driving his car around his yard when it caught fire and burned his hands. Caught in flaming wrecks so many times over his 40 years in racing, his skin no longer tans in the sun.
In September 1990, Foyt suffered a brake failure at the Road America race course in Elkhart, Wisconsin. His $450,000 car crashed through a wooden fence and careened through the air before diving three feet in an embankment. His left leg snapped with the tibia bone shooting through his kneecap and piercing his thigh, his left heel was crushed, the right heel ripped from its socket. Never losing consciousness during the 30 minutes it took to pry him from his wreckage, Foyt was broken but not beaten. Steve Watterson, the strength and rehabilitation coach of the Houston Oilers, began working with Foyt four days after he came out of his casts. “I’ve worked on destroyed joints before, but nothing of this magnitude. I couldn’t even fathom what he’d been through.” A grueling therapeutic regimen that Foyt worked for 6 1/2 hours per day for three months astonished athletes half his age. When asked why he drove himself so relentlessly, he replied “I just didn’t want to be a damn cripple for the rest of my life.”
Seven months later he was back at the wheel at the Indy 500 attempting to achieve yet another victory. “I’m gonna win it one more time” said the 56 year old pro. “Then I’ll quit.” The odds were clearly stacked against him; no one thought he could return to racing after such crippling injuries. Watterson took a different view; “A.J.’s driven to drive that car again. He lives it, he tastes it, he sleeps it. It’s an addiction.” At that time, his record for winning the Indy was shared with Al Unser, Sr., but the cantankerous Texan was undaunted. “Before the wreck I set my goals to run Indianapolis once more. And I always meet my goals.” Mario Andretti, who calls Foyt the Master and has battled him on the racetracks of the world for over 30 years, was not a bit surprised that he would attempt the Indy one last time.
In 1963 Foyt staged his own personal battle with Firestone, the company that dominated the Indy. Searching for an improved racing tire, Foyt flew to the Goodyear Company in Akron, Ohio and persuaded them to produce a superior tire of Foyt’s design. Two years later, Goodyear finally came up with a product that satisfied him. Foyt won his second Indy in 1964 using Firestone tires but wearing a Goodyear driving suit. The two companies locked horns and a tire war ensued, but by 1975 Goodyear put Firestone out of racing.
Foyt’s temper is as hot as the rubber he burns. In 1963 he and his father, A.J. Sr., purchased 1,500 acres of Texas pine woods, clearing 600 acres and building barns and houses by themselves. Following the death of his mother Evelyn in 1981 and his father in 1983, Foyt bulldozed their home, because it “hurt too much to look at it.” When one of his horses accidentally rolled on his daughter, he shot it to death on the spot. Such hair trigger action has two sides; when Foyt saw that his friend and three-time Indy winner Johnny Rutherford crash and burn at a race in Phoenix, Arizona, Foyt, already withdrawn from the race due to mechanical problems, sprinted to the wreck and helped pull Rutherford from the car. “He followed me to the hospital to make sure I was okay,” said Rutherford. “Then he took me to the hotel to make sure I was comfortable. I never forgot that.” In 1965 Foyt had a serious accident at Riverside, California in which he broke his back and suffered a concussion, ripped breastbone, broken left heel and dislocated right foot. In 1989, he was in intensive care in Charlotte after a crash with a bruised heart and a neck injury.
After emerging from a race car on a test drive for his last Indy that clocked 213 mph around the track, Foyt pauses and eyed the contours of the speedway that surrounded him. “I hope I can win the damn thing, walk away and say the hell with it.”
A self-made millionaire who never finished high school, Foyt owns a 1,500 acre ranch in Hockley, Texas, where he breeds Thoroughbreds, a second ranch in West Texas, a home in Houston, one in Austin, and a Honda dealership.
Foyt married his wife Lucy in 1955 and together they had three children, A.J. III, born in 1957, daughter Terry in 1959 and son Jerry 1964. He and wife make their home in Houston, Texas.
Link to Wikipedia biography