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AJ Foyt’s later years: the IndyCar politics, Porsche 935s and crashes that shaped his legacy
Art Garner’s AJ Foyt Volume Two: Legacy picks up the story in 1978, covering the IndyCar split, sports car successes, serious crashes and the extraordinary determination that carried Foyt into his 90th year
AJ Foyt, Daytona, 1981; his two wins in the Daytona 24 Hours would follow later in the decade…
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Two years after the appearance of AJ Foyt Volume One: Survivor, Champion, Legend, its sequel, Legacy, continues the tale of this American motor racing hero, beginning in 1978 and bringing us up to date with 2025 and a landmark birthday party. While Foyt is toasted, the man who survived some of racing’s most dangerous eras utters the immortal words: “Who’d ever think I’d be here now at 90 years old? I don’t think I’m s’posed to live this long. I’m living for a reason but I don’t know why!”
For anyone curious about Foyt, or who has the remotest interest in the past half-century of IndyCar racing, this book is a must. Author Art Garner has excelled in accumulating a plethora of interviews, and also appears to have used almost every article ever printed about Foyt – the quote attribution notes alone at the end of this heavyweight tome run to 36 pages, after near-as-dammit 600 pages of text. It’s a forensic piece of work, with no stone unturned.
…And one of those Daytona victories was in Preston Henn’s Porsche 935 in 1983
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It’s also fascinating. Coming in as it does in 1978, it begins not long before Foyt’s drift into the nether regions of the IndyCar grid, and amid the shadow of the looming split between USAC and the new CART organisation that would change the landscape of US open-wheel racing in the 1980s, as well as Super Tex’s flip-flopping between whether to support one body or the other. The politics tired him: “Life was a heck of a lot simpler when I was running midgets, drinking beer and getting in fights at Ascot.”
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Despite his waning powers in Indycars, what is clear is that Foyt was an extraordinary talent behind the wheel. His diversion into IMSA’s blue-riband sports car races in the 1980s includes the well-known tale of his sudden mid-race call-up from Preston Henn’s Porsche 935 team at the 1983 Daytona 24 Hours – to the disgust of lead driver Bob Wollek, who then became a convert to Foyt’s ability to push a car new to him and nurse its fragilities at the same time, often in inclement weather. Ditto the admiration of those at his beloved Indy 500, incredulous that he could gun for the front row after just a handful of laps in the preceding week of practice.
It’s all down to his intuitive feel. As his 2013-16 driver Takuma Sato puts it (in a chapter appropriately titled The Odd Couple): “AJ was sitting there, knowing nothing about the data, however he just identified what my main problem is [from watching on the TV monitor] before I start talking.”
AJ Foyt Volume Two: Legacy
Art Garner
Octane Press, £40.99
ISBN 9781642341959
Foyt as a bull of a man also pervades these pages: recovery from his numerous wrecks, including the path back from his terrible Road America 1990 crash; getting lifted onto his bulldozer at his ranch to work while ‘recovering’ from heart bypass surgery; thumping Arie Luyendyk at the controversial 1997 Texas IRL race. It’s been a colourful life, entertainingly and poignantly told.
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