As in Foyt

He was standing atop the pit wall, hands on hips, looking out through slitted eyes at the Frenchmen--people he distrusts because they serve fish with the heads and tails still on them. And if that isn't enough, they all talk this goddamn funny language. Close beyond the first tight circle of Frenchmen was a looser stand of European journalists, all of them poised, waiting for some of those clean, cutting, kiss-my-ass quotes they had heard about. And beyond them all, parked on the edge of the track, sat the car.

The car was Ford's Mark IV, rear-engined, low-slung and roofed over, strictly low-mileage; 2580 pounds, exactly 499 horsepower in its 427-cubic-inch engine. It sat there with its tail up and its nose down like a good race car should and on the hood, roof and doors it wore No. 1. There was no special significance to the No. 1--but there was real meaning behind the red color. That was there to piss off Enzo Ferrari.

Now he reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet: the standard leather fold-over model. It was so full of money that it would barely fold over. "Here, hold onna this," he told a friend. The Frenchmen all sighed. The journalists all sighed; some of them jotted down in their notebooks, "Much Indy money." Then he turned to a crew official. "I know it's famous and all that stuff. I mean: I know this here is the scariest track in Europe and all that. But what I mean is: This here"--and he waved one hand out at the track--"this here is just a country road that twists around a whole lot and runs through a bunch of trees, right?"

Several heads nodded.

And A. J. Foyt shrugged inside his driving suit. "Well, then," he said, and he smiled.

He has bone-white teeth, something of a natural dental wonder. He is probably so full of calcium that you couldn't break him with repeated blows of a tire iron. This hardgloss, Kelvinator-door smile has been known to paralyze full-grown women at tight range.

It was France in June 1967 and a couple of weeks earlier Foyt had won the Indianapolis 500 for the third time. He was the darling of the racing world, a status he had carved out over 12 years of the meanest hornyhanded driving anyone had ever seen. And now he was set to drive the 24 hours of Le Mans with Dan Gurney as copilot--over a 8.475-mile course that savages the best men in the world.

Just outside town, along old RN158, the main drag from Alençon to Tours, the road widens up quite a bit and becomes a dead straightaway for about three and one half miles. Once every year they chase all the hay shakers off there, the horse-drawn wagons and old Citroëns and older men pedaling bicycles loaded up with bunches of tied twigs--and it becomes the Mulsanne Straight, then and now the fastest stretch of road ever incorporated into a closed circuit.

There are trees up close along both sides and down toward the end of the straight you have to be hitting 200 or 210 miles an hour or you might as well park it. And as if you haven't got enough to do just hanging on, they've got this row of signs off to one side that tell you something--if you could read the things at that blind speed. Well, the signs are counting down kilometers, because at the end of the straight, just after this little 200-mile-an-hour soft right-hand dog-leg, they've got this 35-mile-an-hour corner where you've got to suck everything up tight. Suddenly you're going in the other direction. Back off a bit and hit the brakes; really mash down, then drag it down to first gear and breathe the brakes. Then hammer her back up to somewhere around 180 mph; gear down to 40 mph for a right-hander, gear down again for that slow left-right; punch it back to 160. Stand on it some more and crank it around the White House Corner and you had better plan to be hitting 180 and climbing as you go past the pits or everybody will think you're a fucking tourist. Over the hill and into the esses, where, usually, you are suddenly right up to your ass in little Alfas buzzing along in their own little race. You do all this 350 times in 24 hours, driving through night and day, and half the time it is raining down at one end of the track and sunny at the other--and most of the time they've got this cross wind that huffs up and blows you over one whole lane.

Foyt had it wired from the start. The Le Mans track really is just a little old country road, like he said. Anyone who would pump it full of special mystique and read extra romantic nuance into it just doesn't understand what it is that makes Foyt so special. Foyt recognizes a road and a car for what they really are and what they can do. And he bites people who don't do the same.

They won it, of course, and for the record, they covered 3249.6 miles in 24 hours at an average speed of 135.48 miles an hour, shattering the track record by the biggest margin in the history of the event. (They also averaged five and a half miles per gallon of gas and burned 20 quarts of oil.) On the victory stand, after spraying everybody--including chairman Henry Ford II and his new bouffant wife--with champagne, Foyt allowed as how "I tole you; damn, I tole you guys, that this here road isn't any different than a whole lot I have drove on."

They loved him in Europe; they still do. Foyt marched through Le Mans chin out and shoulders up in a stance that is peculiar to stock-car racers, and everybody else looked somehow fey by comparison. He also said exactly what he meant--in the land of the devious quote.

European Journalist: First you win ze Indy. And now, ze historic 24 hours of Le Mans. These two victories will make you famous, no?

A. J. Foyt: Famous? Lissen: I'll tell you what made me famous. You see this here right foot? Well, that there foot is what made me famous.

At lunch a few days before the race, sitting on a sun-washed terrace at one of the world's better restaurants, Foyt had growled softly at the waiter: "Gahdamn," he had said. "You expect me to eat this here fish? Lookee here, the little old sumbitch is staring at me." And while the fish was being whisked away for proper Texas trimming, Foyt had grinned at his companions. "This here is a trick country," he said.

It was a clean, hot day and the companionship was good--fellow race drivers, really the only humans with whom Foyt feels at large ease. Denis Hulme was there, the big, affable New Zealander who had just been named rookie of the year at Indy, and whom everybody calls The Bear. Roger McCluskey was there, a small, very tough survivor of the same sort of racing that had created Foyt: everything from midgets to stockers to Indy cars.

This was the summer before the microskirt had really moved over to the U. S. and among the diners on the terrace was a scattering of bare thighs, belonging to these golden, willowy girls who were looking on at the drivers, clearly interested.

"I wonder if it's true about French ladies; you know, where they don't wear any pants," one of the drivers said.

Everybody looked around. "Man," said another, "if you don't find out in a place like this here, you'll never know."

At the table next to Foyt, one of the girls leaned over.

"You are the racing drivers for Le Mans, no?" she said.

Foyt flashed her the smile and she practically pitched forward into her quiche Lorraine.

"Uh-huh," he said. Then he paused. "Well, all of us here except this one." He pointed to McCluskey. "He's really a monkey."

She nodded brightly, accepting that. "I see the monkey," she said.

McCluskey looked at her and shrugged. "Yeah," he said, "Well, hell, ma'am, I can see yours, too."

• • •

Anthony Joseph Foyt, Jr., now 39 years old, was born in Houston, Texas, of sound stock and raised up to be steady of kidney, a kid with the good sense to leave school before they got to John Greenleaf Whittier or, worse yet, social studies--the sort of thing that can screw up a brain for fair. "I couldn't study any longer," he says now. "I could already take a car apart and put it back together better 'n it was . . ." and he concludes the sentence with a sort of shrug indicating that anybody who needs more schooling than that will probably grow up to be some sort of bum, anyway. It is a matter of record that the exact last time he ever took any advice from anybody was in 1946. He was 11 at the time.

The senior A. J. remembers it well: "It was right after the war and I owned and campaigned two midget race cars in those days. So I took one of them to Dallas for a race and Miz Foyt went along with me. We left one of the cars at home--and we left A. J. home, too.

"Well, when we got back--I guess it was about 5:30 in the morning or so--we found the whole yard tore up. I mean everything was gone. The grass was all chewed to bits and there were tire gouges all over the place. The swing set we had in the yard had been knocked over; the place was one mess. I knew right away that A. J. had got some of his buddies to push him and that they had got that midget fired up; it didn't have a self-starter. And then--after I had stood there and looked at the messed-up yard, I went into the garage and saw the car. And I knew what had happened; he had caught the thing on fire and had burned up the engine. It was sitting there with the paint all scorched.

"I went right into the house and into his bedroom; I was thinking of whapping him. He was laying there playing he was asleep, but I could tell he wasn't really. My wife said, 'Well, don't say anything to him right now when you're still so mad. So I didn't shake him up. But I knew right then, standing there in the kid's bedroom, that he would have to race, that there wasn't going to be any other way."

Next day, Dad dispensed the advice: "All right, you want to race, you can race. Only thing you got to promise me is always to drive something good. And one more thing: Stay the hell off the grass."

The rest is history, suitably laced with legend. Foyt drove his dad's midget cars at first, developing a sort of personalized balls-out, catch-me-come-kiss-me style that became part of his trademark. The other part consisted of those teeth and a jaw line that might have been done by Gutzon Borglum, plus real-silk shirts and crisp fresh white pants for every race. The pants probably did it: He acquired the nickname Fancy Pants and promptly kicked the hell out of anyone who said it in the wrong tone of voice--and by the time he was ready for bigger cars, it was clear that he was going to be either a champion driver or the damnedest middleweight ever to come out of Houston.

First time up at Indy, A. J. Fancy Pants talked himself into the Dean Van (continued on page 92) A.J.--As in Foyt (continued from page 84) Lines Special, a hot car of the day--hanging in there in 16th place. Three years later, he won the race, $117,975, and he has been getting richer ever since. "You know," a sponsor once mused, "for a guy who didn't get any schooling, Foyt sure knows how to read a contract."

Through the years, the United States Auto Club has watched A. J.'s career with special pride, mixed with a sort of bemused dread. Foyt is enough to make any organization proud and he is always good copy, a credit to the game and all that bullshit, but he also has a keenly honed sense of swift justice. In a 1963 episode, at a badass, no-account sprintcar race in Williams Grove, Pennsylvania, Foyt felt that fellow racer Johnny White was cutting him off at the turns. This sort of maneuver was a source of considerable irritation to Foyt and the moment the race was over, he vaulted out of his car and sprinted over to White.

According to one U.S.A.C. official, A. J. opened the conversation by slugging White, who reported the incident, and Foyt was suspended from racing.

At the appeal, Foyt brought McCluskey along as a character witness and, in his best courtroom manner, explained what happened: "I didn't either slug him," Foyt said. "Oh, I had him around the head pretty good and I was holding him, all right. But I didn't hit him." And McCluskey provided the clincher.

"A. J. didn't hit White," he testified. "If he had of, he would have ctore his head off."

Case dismissed; driver reinstated.

The reputation grew, shor through, in no special order, with all sorts of highlights:

• Not too many years ago, at a midget race in Terre Haute, Foyt failed to qualify because of car troubles and a deteriorating track. The winner's purse was only $600, and any man would have been well out of it, but Foyt was ticked off. So he walked down the line, found the right driver and paid him $100 to let him have the 24th, and last, starting position. By mid-race, Foyt was in first place, and he won, as they say, by a mile.

• In March of 1964, Foyt showed up for the 12 hours of Sebring, a sports-car race that draws both tough and elegant gentlemen from the road-racing world. The Le Mans-type start sort of threw him; Foyt is a driver, not a sprinter. As a result, he got a late start.

The field roared away, and just as the smartasses in the crowd were pointing out that one should never--but never--leave one's proper niche in the world, the cars came around again.

And there was Foyt: He had passed 51 cars on the first lap. He rolled by the stands and gave them his kiss-my-ass shrug.

And now he is on top. By count, Foyt has won more races and more championships than any other driver alive: in midgets, sprint cars, dirt cars, stock cars, Indy cars, sports cars and God knows.

A few years ago at Indianapolis, they told the story around the pits about the race driver who lost it in the second turn and skidded all the way to the pearly gates. Saint Peter walked up and put his arm around the race driver's shoulder. "Listen, son," he said, "you're in heaven. Don't look so unhappy."

"Hell--I mean, er--excuse me, shucks, I was right smack in the middle of my best season. I had that championship all locked up. And now I can't race anymore."

"'Course you can," said Saint Peter. "This is heaven, ain't it?" And so Saint Peter took him down and showed him a solid-gold track that was so unbelievably beautiful that the driver just stood there and quivered.

"What about race cars?" he asked.

"Race cars," Saint Peter said. "Race cars. Just take your pick." And he waved an arm toward the pit area.

The race driver casually strolled over to a gold-and-white rear-engined Offy and scraped at the finish with a dirty fingernail. Just as he thought: 14-kt.-gold and mother-of-pearl.

"Try it, son," Saint Peter said.

"I don't know. I mean, man, this here is a weird scene," he said. All the while, he was easing himself into the cockpit. He buckled up and slipped on his helmet. The car roared to full power--a throaty, solid sound he knew well--and he wheeled it onto the track. First lap, he broke the track record. Then, suddenly, he was in traffic. There were race cars everywhere and he was blowing them off like he had never been able to do down there at Daytona or Indy. Not even in this best season of his. Why, he could put that rascal up high in the corners or down low. Anywhere. And it stuck right in there.

After six or seven sizzling laps of weaving through traffic, along came this car and it passed him, the driver giving him the finger. And right there on the driver's helmet were the initials A. J. F. He wheeled the car in and coasted to a stop. Saint Peter strode up.

"What's the matter, son? You were turning some pretty fast laps."

"I didn't know Foyt was dead," he said.

"Oh, that's not Foyt. That's God. He just thinks He's Foyt."

It was weeks before anyone told Foyt the story. The man who did it was Parnelli Jones, who is carved right out of concrete: if Foyt had punched him, the resulting fight would have torn the track up for miles around.

"Very funny," Foyt said and stomped off.

• • •

A visitor talked with A. J. in a motel outside Daytona last year. Foyt was tired after a hard day on the track. He'd blown an engine and now he watched television as Evel Knievel jumped a bunch of Mack trucks.

"You know, he's all right, Evel," Foyt said. "He's been out to my farm and I kind of like him."

It is the highest compliment A. J. gives anybody.

He eased his burly frame onto the bed and patted down his hair to cover the forehead that is becoming more and more apparent these days (A. J. had tried a hairpiece at Atlanta a couple of years ago but shelved it after Bobby Allison met him in the pits and said, "Where's your daddy, sonny? I wanna talk to him about his race car.").

"You know," he mused, looking up at the ceiling, "a lot of people worry about getting to be 40. Not me. Hell, I'll be 40 next January and my reflexes are just as good as ever. A man's reflexes don't change. Only his eyes. And lemme tell you, when your eyes go, you're through.

"I mean, did you see that goddamn thing the A.P. wrote about me a couple of weeks ago? Said I was gonna retire after this season. Shit. My eyesight is 20/15 and that's what counts." And he turned back to the television.

"You think he'll ever jump that Snake River Canyon? I do. He's crazy enough to do it. He is."

And he rubbed his scarred hands over his eyes. The hands tell a lot. The knuckles of a fighter and fingers of a mechanic. But that was $2,500,000 ago.

As if on cue, he speaks of those early days (perhaps the A.P. story did get to him):

"You know, there were times when people actually booed me for breaking Tommy Hinnershitz' record on those Pennsylvania dirt tracks. That's when I was running the sprinter.

"Tommy was so popular that the fans couldn't stand watching him get old and seeing a smartassed young kid from Houston taking his records away. But I think his eyes went on him.

"Why, I used to watch Tommy run that track, and it was a sight to behold. We were running knobby tires then. You know, them big old skinny things with knobs for tread, and they were rough. You had to run a lot harder with those tires on the dirt tracks then. I mean, you ran in hard and deep in the corners. Voom!" Foyt uses racing sounds as punctuation, semicolons and all. "And once you committed yourself, it was too (continued on page 188) A.J.--As in Fort (continued from page 92) late to back off. You had to run in straight and just throw the car sideways. Blam! And hope to hell those old tires didn't get a bite then. Because if they did, it would throw the whole goddamn car out of the park." Foyt said, "Blooey!

"It was so rough that a lot of people got fractured elbows and broken arms, just from trying to hang on to that wheel. I got two busted elbows. Man, when a race was over, it looked like everybody had been in a hatchet fight.

"And ol' Tommy would run in so hard that he'd get the car up on its right wheels so far you could see the whole undercarriage. He could have so bill-board space on the bottom of the car.

"Ah, hell," he said. "Those were the days."

• • •

"I still tell anybody to go to hell if I feel like it." Foyt says. "I mean, some people think that old crash at Riverside slowed me down, but look at my record. I won Indy again after that and Le Mans and the Daytona 500 and a hell of a lot of other races. Is that slowing down?"

The Riverside crash, however, makes him stop and think. It has been nine years since it happened, and it was the only time he was ever seriously hurt (this does not count routine breaks, bruises, burns and lumps, including being run over by one's own race car). At Riverside, Foyt was running in a NASCAR stock-car race on the road course and had been one of the front runners most of the afternoon.

About two thirds of the way through the race, the twisting course had taken its toll on the 4000-pound stocker: The brakes were completely gone and a quick pit stop determined that they couldn't be repaired. At this point, a lot of racers would have parked it behind the pit wall and gone for a Coors. Foyt roared out of the pits and ducked in behind Junior Johnson, one of NASCAR's best and a man A. J. knew he could trust. One does not follow just anybody closely when one has no brakes. A. J. knew that Junior was not apt to make a mistake.

It worked for about ten laps and, true. Junior did not make a mistake. But the car in front of Johnson did and Junior had to hit his brakes--having no idea that Foyt didn't have any to hit. They were just entering the sweeping turn nine at about 140 mph. A. J. had a fraction of a second to weigh the situation. He could hit Junior full-bore in the rear or turn right. He turned right and the car leaped over the embankment. The nose dug in and the force catapulted the car 50 feet into the air: it slammed down on its top with a sickening crash.

Foyt was unconscious when they got to him. It wasn't until they got him to the hospital that a discerning doctor discovered that Foyt had a broken back. "A. J. Foyt will never race again." they pronounced; the sort of refrain that race drivers could set to music.

It took Foyt roughly two weeks to convince the doctors that he would be just as well oft at home in bed. From there it took him another week to convince his wife, Lucy, that he would be better off in the Arizona sun, watching an Indy car race from a nice, easy wheelchair.

Two weeks later, he was watching a race from a nice, easy race car. He winced a lot as he got in and out of the car and everybody knew that he assuredly hurt like hell during the races, but he was back racing.

Now they say he's mellowing.

"I don't feel that I have to prove myself. If I decide I want to win, I go out and win. If I don't. I just don't care," he says.

But can one believe that the best race driver around doesn't care about winning? He drives as hard today as he ever has. And he isn't shy about declaring his intention to pass another car. I mean, if he waves you over, you ought really to give him room.

And he knows the quick route around every track in the country. "I know the tracks pretty good now," he says. "But I can never tell exactly how I'm going to drive a track until the time comes. When I get ahead. I just follow the groove. If I get behind. I just work my way back up front the best way I know how. My hands get tired in a 500-miler from hanging on to the wheel. Sometimes on the straights I open my hands and push down on the wheel with my palms to rest my fingers. If things are going real well. I might drive with one hand. But it's no Hollywood effect. My hands just get tired."

Foyt has been known to ham it up, though. A few years ago at Daytona, he had his Ford running so far out in front of the pack that he could have coasted the remaining five or six laps. He had led the race for so long that the covey of Ford executives in the paddock area had already made reservations for the victory dinner that night. His pit crew was lounging on stacks of tires examining their fingernails. That's when Foyt came out of the fourth turn, backed off the accelerator and ducked into the pits for an unscheduled stop. The Ford execs froze. The pit-crew members fell all over themselves getting to the pit wall. They stood in horror as Foyt poked his head through the window.

"You all want me for anything?" he asked. Then he flashed the white smile, dumped it back into gear and roared out of the pits, still comfortably in first place. He won, of course.

• • •

So here he is at Daytona, Super Tex at 39, who says he won't quit, no matter what the Associated Press says. The Associated Press can kiss his ass.

He is standing by his pit, looking out at the world through the slitted eye--ready to talk only to those he really cares to talk to. A driver comes into view.

This is Paul Newman. Mr. Blue Eyes, the face that American millions adore; there are folks all over Daytona, men and women alike, who would give their right front fenders to stand alongside a pit wall and chat with Paul Newman.

True. Newman has credentials; he is a race driver himself, though undistinguished, in a sport that regularly attracts movie stars. Steve McQueen races; James Garner is a buff; so is one Smothers brother--and who really gives a damn which one it is?

They chat until Foyt figures he has had enough. He turns to the growing circle of fans. "Lissen. you guys, I gotta go," he says. And then he turns to Newman:

"So long. Steve," he says.