THE INDIANAPOLIS 500 : A.J. Foyt a Winner as a Teacher, Too : Four-Time Champion Has Coached Two Rookie Drivers Into the Field

Forget all that talk about A.J. Foyt retiring. He may hang up his helmet and gloves after 30 years of racing at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, but he’s already launched a new racing career.

The tempestuous Texan is looking for a new A.J. Foyt. He should know that he’ll never find one like the original, but that isn’t going to stop him from looking . . . and working . . . and coaching.

Two years ago, when he wasn’t running too well, A.J. said that he’d probably retire after his 30th year at Indy.

Why?

“Thirty sounds like a nice round number,” he said at the time.

“Ah, I never said anything like that,” he said here this week. “You know me, I wouldn’t say I was quittin’ when I’m having so much fun.”

For years, Foyt has turned his backup cars over to other drivers to qualify for the 500. In the past, it has always been a crony, usually George Snider, but also Jim McElreath, Johnny Rutherford, Carl Williams or Bill Vukovich.

This year, he has two talented youngsters, Davy Jones, 22, and Stan Fox, 33, driving for him.

“I’m looking for someone young who wants to go out and run 17 or 18 races a year and knock heads,” he said. “I want to run a team when I’m through racing.”

He’s already running one. Foyt has four cars, including his own, in the race.

Foyt almost took himself out of the race Thursday when he crashed in the first turn during Carburetion Day practice. He was not injured, however, and the car will be repaired for Sunday’s race.

Snider, his pal from Bakersfield, is Foyt’s fourth driver after qualifying for his 22nd 500. Among Sunday’s starters, only Foyt has qualified for more.

A.J. has always been his own chief mechanic--no matter what the entry blanks showed--and he hasn’t changed. He hovers around each car, poking at it with screwdrivers and wrenches, barking orders to mechanics and lecturing his drivers.

Jones, who became the year’s fastest rookie with four laps at 208.117 m.p.h., had this to say about Foyt:

“He sort of reminds me of Bobby Knight. He only accepts the best. He makes some demands and makes sure they’re done now and right. It’s a lot like growing up with my dad, always answering to captain’s orders.”

Jones’ father is a sea captain.

How demanding is A.J.?

When a reporter informed him that Jones had become the fastest rookie, A.J. snapped: “That’s what he’s supposed to be.”

Fox, who got his start driving midgets at the old Corona Raceway in 1971, has raced primarily midgets in United States Auto Club races near his home in Janesville, Wis. He qualified one of Foyt’s March-Cosworths last Saturday at 204.518 m.p.h., but not before feeling the wrath of the boss.

“I wasn’t happy with the way the car felt,” Fox said. “A.J. was adjusting the wing and I mentioned that it felt like he was taking too much out.”

A.J. looked up, gave Fox his fiercest look and snapped: “I’m working on the car, you’re driving it.”

Foyt was the one with egg on his face Thursday.

“I had a meeting with my rookies this morning and told them don’t be out there racing cars in traffic--it’s only carburetion day--and I turn around and do it myself,” he said after his crash.

Jones has been driving sports cars since turning professional at 18. He and Jeff Andretti shared a ride on the BMW team last season in the International Motor Sports Assn. GTP series, where they set a track record in winning the pole and then the race at Watkins Glen, N.Y.

Last month, when he came here for rookie orientation, was the first time Jones had been at Indianapolis.

A.J. knows what it’s like to be 22 and racing in his first Indy 500. That’s how old he was in 1958 when he came here with Al Dean and Clint Brawner to drive the Dean Van Lines roadster.

“I was pretty damn nervous that day. Pretty shaky. That’s one thing that hasn’t changed.”

A.J. takes a paternal interest in his “boys,” as he calls them.

When Jones first attempted to qualify last Saturday, he ran a quick 205 m.p.h. lap, but on his 202 m.p.h. second lap he almost scraped the wall.

Foyt, the man in command, waved a yellow flag, aborting the run.

“The boy looked like he was in trouble, and I didn’t want anyone to get hurt,” Foyt said. “I knew he was tight like I was my first time here. He got excited and I think he spooked himself. I know he sure scared the hell out of me.”

Sunday morning, Jones’ education continued.

Foyt took him around the track in one of the pace cars, pointing out where to let up and where to pick up the throttle, where to squeeze close to the cement wall and where to drift down to get a better run at the next corner.

“Davy was going into the corners too tight, pinching the car,” A.J. said. “I told him he ought to give the car a little head in the corners and go in looser.”

Jones followed instructions to the letter, starting off with a 207.135 lap and getting faster each time around until he reached 209.176 the final lap.

“Everything A.J. said paid off,” Jones said. “I had been out earlier in the morning and couldn’t get up to 200, but the coaching I got from A.J. controlled me and showed me I could do it. Working with him has just been a fantastic adventure.”

A.J., the coach, became A.J., the mechanic, just before Jones’ qualifying attempt.

“I made a little adjustment on the right rear wing,” A.J. said. “Davy said he wanted a compromise with the wing, but I told him he’d be all right with the way I changed it.

“Just before he took off, I pointed to my head, reminding him to use his head and not get in trouble. I don’t even know if he saw me, but he did a hell of a job.”

After it was all over, the interviews and the posing for pictures out of the way, Foyt, 52, draped his arm around the shoulder of Jones, 22, and the pair walked down pit row together.

The final day qualifying crowd erupted in yet another rolling cheer for Foyt, still the most compelling figure at the 500.

But what of Foyt the racer, the Super Tex who has won the 500 four times, sat on the pole four times and led 13 different 500s?

After two lackluster races the last two years, in which he finished 28th and 24th, Foyt arrived here two weeks ago after skipping both the Long Beach and Phoenix races.

Little was expected from him except a retirement speech.

Spending more time coaching Fox and Jones than with preparing his own Lola-Cosworth, Foyt took only a minimum of practice laps before the first qualifying day.

Unpredictable as usual, Foyt responded with a 210.935--fourth fastest in the 500.

Foyt is continually being asked when he will retire. It used to bug him, but he has come up with a new answer.

“I ain’t quitting until I get that five grand for being the oldest driver in the 500,” he said, a grin sweeping across his face. “Last year, I thought I had it made, and then on carburetion day they totaled a car out and that put that darn (Dick) Simon back in the race as an alternate. The least they could have done was give me half (of the $5,000).

Simon, who is 53, is in the second row along with Foyt and Roberto Guerrero.

There will be a lot of age up front Sunday, and A.J. likes it that way.

Mario Andretti, the pole sitter, is 47. Foyt and Simon, in their 50s, are on the second row. Johnny Rutherford, 49, is in the third row.

“I’m thrilled to be starting up there with a bunch of old compadres ,” he said. “I know how they race, and we’ve raced wheel to wheel before, so I’m glad to be up there with all of them.”

Did Foyt, back in 1958, ever even dream that he’d be racing here for 30 years?

“Do you wanna know the truth?” he said. “When I first started racing everybody said I wouldn’t live to be 21 years old, so I made liars out of a bunch of people.

“No, really, I never thought I’d run this long. I always felt I’d run as long as I felt competitive and my health allowed me to run.

“There were times when I’ve been hurt pretty seriously before May, and I should have missed the race, but I was able to do it. The doctors told me I’d never race again in 1965, much less race a few months later at Indy, after I broke my back and legs in Riverside (on Jan. 17 in the Motor Trend 500), but then I came back here and set a new track record qualifying.”

Foyt was injured when he went over the wall at Turn 9 at Riverside and flipped end-over-end down an embankment rather than crash into Junior Johnson and Marvin Panch, who had spun in the middle of the turn.

“To qualify 30 years straight here, I guess I don’t believe it myself,” he said.

Foyt has not won an Indy-car race since the 1981 Pocono 500, although he has done well in sports cars where he won four long distance races in the past four years. The Indy-car slump, he believes, was caused by the death of his mother and his father, who also was his crew chief, within two years.

“I ain’t looking for excuses, but it’s true when they died it put me in shock,” he said. “My father and mother were my biggest fans and my biggest rooters, and they were with me all my life. I was probably too close to my family. When they left me, it really threw me into kind of a stupor.

“I didn’t care what happened. I didn’t care if I died tomorrow. That was my attitude, which was a bad attitude.”

A.J. even kept everything in his father’s room exactly the way it was the day he died. It took a visit to an old Gypsy friend to snap him out of his depression.

“She asked me, ‘A.J., how old are you?’ I said 49, and she said, ‘How long did you live with your parents? About 49 years?’

“I said I didn’t live with them all that time, but that, yes ma’am I was pretty close with them. And she said, ‘How do you expect to forget them in one year?’

“That woke me up. I went and took daddy’s clothes out of his home, which I’d kept for two years. I’d kept everything up like he was there. I’d go over there every now and then and act like a damned child looking for him, even though I knew he wasn’t there.

“It took that old Gypsy lady to get it in my mind to face reality, that there was nothing I could do about it.”

There has been another change in Foyt, but it has been a surface change.

He still drives No. 14, but instead of it being orange, like his old Coyotes, the car is black, with orange trim around white lettering.

His driving uniform is all black, which makes his blocky figure even more imposing, but he still wears an orange helmet.

A perfect Halloween costume for trick or treat--which is what A.J. Foyt is all about.

His new trick is coaching his boys, and his treat is that he’ll probably be around the Speedway forever.