NASCAR columnist Al Pearce is taking two weeks off to tidy up a heart-related issue at MCV/VCU Hospital in Richmond. In his absence, the Rocky Mount Telegram will reprint excerpts from his 2022 book with colleague Mike Hembree titled “50 First Victories: NASCAR Drivers’ Breakthrough Wins.” Today’s features A.J. Foyt.
Hear the name “A.J. Foyt” and the first thing you probably jump to are four wins in the Indianapolis 500, victories in long-distance sports car races at LeMans, Sebring and Daytona Beach, a dozen USAC/CART national championships and 67 USAC/CART IndyCar victories.
Given all that, it’s understandable that his NASCAR Cup Series resume might be overlooked. It shouldn’t be, for when Anthony Joseph Foyt was at his best, he was as good as anybody who’s ever crawled into a stock car.
“Super Tex” had a NASCAR career that almost anybody would love to have. He won nine Cup poles and seven races in just 128 starts and had 23 other top-five finishes and 14 other top-10s. Six of his seven victories came in 400- or 500-mile races on superspeedways; the other was a grueling 505-miler on a road course. There wasn’t anything even remotely easy about any of them.
The first of those seven came in the July 4, 1964, Firecracker 400 in Daytona Beach. Foyt, 29 at the time, drove the No. 47 Dodge owned by Ray Nichels and led by crew chief Crawford Clements. After starting 19th, he avoided a first-lap accident when Reb Wickersham almost nailed him nearing Turn 1. Foyt went on to lead eight times for 14 laps in just his 10th NASCAR start.
Astonishingly, he and teammate Bobby Isaac swapped the lead 16 times in the final 55 of the 160 laps. Isaac led most of that time (41 laps to 14), but Foyt made an unexpected three-wide, low-side pass entering Turn 3 on the last lap and held on for the victory.
“It’s a heck of a feeling when you worry about two of your drivers getting each other in trouble,” Nichels said afterward. “But it sure makes you feel good to know they’re running up front. That’s the best racing duel I’ve ever seen. I had two of the very best out there.”
Isaac and Foyt took the white flag together, with the lapped car of Paul Goldsmith right with them. They went three-wide down the backstretch: Foyt inside, Isaac in the middle, Goldsmith outside. They stayed that way into Turn 3, where Foyt almost touched the apron to pass Isaac. He won the dash to the checkered flag, arriving a half-length ahead of Isaac.
“I went way down, getting right to the apron, to pass Bobby going into Turn 3,” Foyt recalled. “Art Lamey of Champion (a spark plug company) told me he’d never seen a number on top of a car until he saw mine in Turn 4.”
Foyt explained: “I didn’t want to be ahead of Bobby starting the last lap (and risk having Isaac slingshot into the lead). I managed to get by him before we hit the corner, then held him off.”
Foyt came back a year later to win Daytona’s summer 400-miler again, this time for Wood Brothers Racing. He won the spring 1970 road race at Riverside, Calif., with owner Jack Bowsher. His last four Cup Series victories came with the Woods: in 1971 at Ontario, Calif., and Atlanta, then in the 1972 Daytona 500 and, two weeks later, back at Ontario.
Except for licensing restrictions, the legendary superstar would have run more NASCAR events.
“The big ones I ran were all FIA-sanctioned (Federation Internationale de l’ Automobile),” he explained. “I couldn’t run the non-FIA races because I would have been barred from other series. I enjoyed NASCAR, but most of my time was in open wheel.”
There was a stretch between 1964 and 1972 when he was almost unbeatable: seven victories, 21 top-5s and 24 top-10s in just 50 starts. Throw in 12 front-row qualifying runs and you have as impressive a stretch as any NASCAR “outsider” has ever enjoyed.
“We’re pretty proud of our record with A.J.,” Wood Brothers Racing co-owner Eddie Wood once said. “We had him for 12 races during parts of 1965, then again in 1971 and 1972.” (During those years Foyt also raced for Bowsher, Banjo Matthews, Junior Johnson and Holman-Moody.) “He had seven poles, five wins and was second, third or fourth in five other races with us. Except for two DNF’s, he never finished worse than fourth in our cars.
“He came in without a lot of NASCAR experience. He’d run some USAC stock cars, but mostly he’d been in IndyCars and Sprints and Midgets. Suddenly, he was in our big, heavy, full-bodied cars going fast on big, paved tracks with a lot of competition all around him. It worked out really well when he came with us, sort of like when (David) Pearson came in after A.J. went back (to) IndyCar. We were fortunate to have two great drivers, one right after the other.”
Foyt’s NASCAR career waned after he and the Woods finished second to Baker in Texas in 1972. Between then and 1994, he made occasional starts with mediocre results for his own team and several owners. His NASCAR involvement ended with a disappointing 30th in the inaugural Brickyard 400 at Indy in 1994. His final 71 Cup Series starts covering 20 years in NASCAR were difficult: 0 poles, 0 victories, 9 top-5s and 13 top-10s.
But it speaks volumes about his skill set that he could occasionally jump into a stock car and show the NASCAR regulars how it was done. Granted, he generally had had top-ranked, front-running equipment, but that shouldn’t dimmish what he did.
Perhaps oddly, given his record, Foyt isn’t in the NASCAR Hall of Fame. Surely that someday will change since he’s been honored by every other meaningful motorsports hall of fame in the world.
Appropriately so, may we add?
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