Smell of the Grease, Roar of Engines Endures in Him

When I first came to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the engines were in the front and canted to the left to keep the cars going in that direction. You turned right to go to the cemetery.

They were all built in garages in Torrance by guys with screwdrivers and rubber hammers and pinups of Marilyn Monroe in the buff on the wall. There wasn’t a computer in sight. The cars used to go in the high 140s in speed. When they hit the wall, the driver got a fire in his lap and maybe in his hair.

They had 750-horsepower supercharged Novis that made an ear-splitting noise as long as they lasted, which, fortunately, was never long. The other engines were mostly Offenhausers and they were almost as homemade as the cars.

As a proving ground, Indy mainly proved that cars could burn. So could drivers. And, in some cases, so could spectators. The Hollywood Freeway had already amply proved all of that, but Indy was as American as apple-bobbing and the apotheosis of America’s love affair with the automobile.

Nowadays, the engines are all in the rear and they’re all made in a laboratory in England. Indy became about as American as the Duke of Kent some time in the early ‘60s, first when a stoic young Aussie named Jack Brabham came over with a funny little car that not only had the engine in the back but developed only 92 horsepower and went through the corners like a scared mouse in a burning building.

In the boxing game, they rate a fighter “pound for pound” the best in the world. Pound for pound, Brabham’s car was the best in the race and, within a year or two, the front-engine car was doomed and the Speedway was never again given over to the do-it-yourself grease monkeys and speed freaks of old.

Indy has changed. The cars cost $240,000 now, not counting tires and shocks; the engines go for $100,000, and the day of the independent entrepreneur is long gone. You get $100,000 from PPG just for winning the pole now. You used to get a gold watch and a free lunch.

The race can be run--and won--from the pits now. The cars go so fast they are tracked by radar, like fighter planes, and racing “teams” are really corporations. The cars go faster than World War II fighter planes. They are not driven, they’re flown.

It has been pointed out that the speed that barely put the driver in this year’s race in the 33rd and last spot--211.076 m.p.h.--would have put him on the pole five years ago. And would have put him in the Cleveland air races 20 years ago.

One thing hasn’t changed at Indy in all those years--the driver in Car No. 14, the honorable Anthony Joseph Foyt Jr., the terrible Texan.

A.J. Foyt is not your grand old man of racing. At an age when he should be the grand marshal or, at best, the driver of the pace car, A.J. is nobody’s token old-timer. A.J. drives to win, not show. And he is solidly in the race in the middle of the third row with an average flying time of 220.425 m.p.h. A.J. doesn’t intend to be in anybody’s rear-view mirror. After all, he’s only 55.

Much is made of a ballplayer who is still solving curveballs at the age of 42. Nolan Ryan still whistling 90-m.p.h. fastballs at 43 boggles the imagination. An Archie Moore or a George Foreman contesting for the heavyweight title at 40 or 41 evokes admiration and awe.

Foyt is driving an automobile through traffic on the most dangerous race course in the world at speeds up to 240 m.p.h. and he’s on his way to being a great-grandfather. He is, by all odds, the most remarkable athlete of his time.

When you consider that, when A.J. Foyt first teed it up in this race--in 1958--Rocky Marciano was only two years retired as heavyweight champion, Eisenhower was President, coffee was a dime and the Berlin Wall had not even been built.

Technology has improved a lot of things at the Speedway, but they haven’t figured a way to improve on A.J. Foyt. He’s still the same cantankerous, get-out-of-my-way, lead-footed guy he was 32 years ago.

What would an Indianapolis 500 be without A.J. Foyt? Just another traffic jam. A race, not an event. News, but not history.

There was an Unser in the first Indy I ever saw. But that was Bobby, a whole generation of Unsers ago. He hung it on the wall after one lap. The other people in the race are long since pictures on a wall. Parnelli Jones won it that year. The late Jimmy Clark in the little British-made Lotus-Ford was second and rookie of the year.

But A.J. Foyt was already a seasoned veteran and former winner. He was driving his sixth Indy 500. He was third, only a fraction of a mile an hour behind the top two.

Foyt could drive this Brickyard blindfolded. Which is a good thing because your eyesight at 55 is not apt to make you handy at squirrel hunting.

It was never advisable to suggest to A.J. Foyt that he was in the race to do anything but win, to imply that he was merely another Sunday driver. Foyt’s temper always had a very short wick on it and could go up like Krakatoa.

This reporter can remember a time he approached the great Foyt on the pit wall during practice. It was not the best of times. When something went wrong with the car, plenty went wrong with Foyt. It was like approaching a lion with a sore paw.

“Can’t you see we’re working here?” he snarled at the reporter.

“What do you think I’m doing?” I shot back.

Foyt, thank God, laughed. Foyt, laughing with a sick car, should have made the Guinness Book of World Records.

In those days, Foyt was either in a car or under it. He never got his cars built by some guys who spoke English with a funny accent and called racers “motor cars.” Foyt put his cars together on a lube rack in Houston. The only thing high-tech in them was Foyt.

That day is long gone. But Foyt isn’t. He’s a genuine American heirloom, like the Alamo, or Ford’s theater. He hasn’t won this thing since 1977. But he was fifth last year. He’s running with the youngsters. If there’s a Foyt in the race, it’s the original, not a Roman numeral. There’s only one.

When Jack Nicklaus won the Masters golf tournament at 46, the whole sports world gasped. But if A.J. Foyt were to win his fifth 500 at 55, it would be like George Burns winning a tap-dance contest with Gregory Hines. To everybody but Foyt. He thinks he should be favored.