Legends: A.J. Foyt

By out-muscling and out-hustling the competition, A.J. Foyt has shown that there’s no one tougher than “Super Tex.” It would have been tough to keep up with Foyt in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. At age 73, he remains the only IndyCar driver to have raced for 35 consecutive years. His seven IndyCar championships remain a record. So does his 67 victories. He’s also the only driver to claim racing’s triple crown with wins in the Indy 500, the 24 Hours of Le Mans (France) endurance race and the Daytona 500, the crown jewel of NASCAR. But Foyt will always be thought of as the king of the Indianapolis 500, a race he ran in five different decades and an event that paid him nearly $3 million in winnings. Foyt’s straight-up, no-nonsense style comes from growing up in a hard-working family on a cattle ranch outside of Houston, Tex. When Foyt began racing, he had a beat-up clunker he built, towed and raced around the Lone Star state with hopes of just making enough money to get him home. He won his first race in 1953 at the age of 18 on a quarter-mile dirt bullring near his hometown. It would be 28 years between that first win and his last in 1981 when he won the Pocono 500 in an open-wheel Indy car. In between, Foyt built himself into one of wealthiest and most respected men ever to roam a garage area.

Since retirement from active competition in the early 1990s, Foyt has concentrated his business as a team owner in the IndyCar series with driver driver Darren Manning at the wheel. With sufficient grit and determination to last several lifetimes, no one doubts that Super Tex, will continue his quest to win.