A.J. Foyt on the pit stand at Pocono Raceway in 2016 wearing an A.J. Foyt Racing team cap and headset

A.J. Foyt: 67 IndyCar Wins, Four Indy 500s, and the Toughest Career in Racing

August 20, 2026

Welcome to the Happy Hour Racing IndyCar Driver Spotlight - where we pull one driver into the garage, look under the hood at their career, and tell you what makes them tick. This week: Super Tex.

The Short Version

A.J. Foyt won 67 IndyCar races and seven national championships, and nobody has topped either number since. He was the first four-time winner of the Indianapolis 500, and he made 35 straight starts there without missing a single year. He also won the Daytona 500, the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the Rolex 24 at Daytona, which no other driver in history has done. If you only know one thing about A.J. Foyt, know that he won in everything he ever climbed into.

The Houston Kid Who Never Left Home

Anthony Joseph Foyt Jr. was born January 16, 1935, in Houston, Texas. His father, Tony, was a mechanic who raced midget cars, so A.J. grew up around engines and around people who made a living turning wrenches. He turned out to be very good at both halves of that job, and he never moved away from Houston to chase the sport. The sport came to him.

He came up through midgets, sprint cars and stock cars on dirt, which was the standard American path in the 1950s and a brutal one. Foyt made his first Indianapolis 500 start in 1958 and won his first national championship in 1960. He won his first Indy 500 in 1961 at age 26. From there he simply did not stop. His championships came in 1960, 1961, 1963, 1964, 1967, 1975 and 1979, spread across two full decades of the sport changing underneath him. Front-engine roadsters gave way to rear-engine cars, turbochargers arrived, and Foyt kept winning through all of it.

The other thing worth understanding about Foyt is that he was his own team. He founded A.J. Foyt Enterprises in late 1965 and ran his own cars, which meant he was the driver, the boss and often the guy who decided what went into the engine. Very few drivers at that level have ever pulled that off.

The Signature Moments

Nineteen sixty-seven was the year that made him a global name. Foyt won his third Indianapolis 500 in May, then went to France in June and won the 24 Hours of Le Mans alongside Dan Gurney in a Ford. It remains one of the great one-two punches in motorsport, and it is the win that separates Foyt from every other American open-wheel great.

Then came 1972. Foyt drove for the Wood Brothers in the Daytona 500, led 167 laps, and won stock car racing's biggest race outright. Add the Rolex 24 at Daytona in 1983 and 1985, and the 12 Hours of Sebring in 1985, and you have a driver who won the four biggest races in four different disciplines.

The one everybody remembers, though, is 1977. Foyt won the Indianapolis 500 for the fourth time, ten years after his third, and became the first driver ever to do it. Rick Mears, Al Unser and Helio Castroneves have since matched the four, but Foyt got there first.

In 1977, AJ Foyt became the first driver to win the #Indy500 four times.
- INDYCAR on FOX (@IndyCarOnFOX) May 14, 2025

Four-time Indianapolis 500 winners Rick Mears, Al Unser and A.J. Foyt standing with the Borg-Warner Trophy at Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 2021 — Rick Mears, Al Unser and A.J. Foyt (right, in the A.J. Foyt Racing cap) with the Borg-Warner Trophy at Indianapolis in 2021. Foyt was the first of the group to reach four wins. (Photo: Zach Catanzareti Photo, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

The Numbers

Here is the A.J. Foyt career laid out in the parts that matter. His 67 Indy car wins and seven national championships are both still records, and his 53 poles rank third all-time behind Will Power and Mario Andretti.

Original Happy Hour Racing graphic. Career figures per A.J. Foyt Racing, INDYCAR and Indianapolis Motor Speedway records.

The Indianapolis numbers deserve their own line. Foyt started 35 consecutive Indianapolis 500s from 1958 through 1992, which is still the record, and he completed 4,904 laps there, more than any driver in the history of the race. He took four Indy 500 poles, in 1965, 1969, 1974 and 1975.

His stock car record is not a footnote either. Foyt made 128 NASCAR Cup Series starts between 1963 and 1994 and won seven of them, with nine poles and 36 top-10 finishes. Doing that as a part-timer, against full-season regulars, tells you plenty.

Life Away From the Track

Foyt married Lucy Zarr in 1955, and they were together for nearly 68 years until she died on April 5, 2023, at age 84. They raised four children: A.J. III, Terry and Jerry, plus their grandson Larry, whom they adopted and raised as their own. Larry Foyt now runs A.J. Foyt Enterprises as team president. Another grandson, A.J. Foyt IV, raced in IndyCar himself.

Away from racing, Foyt has spent his life as a Texas rancher, running cattle and horses on land near Houston. He has also spent a lot of it recovering. A 1990 crash at Road America left him with severe leg and foot injuries that took multiple surgeries to repair, and he came back from it to keep racing. He made his 35th and final Indianapolis 500 start in 1992, finishing ninth, and announced his retirement from driving Indy cars on Pole Day at Indianapolis in May 1993.

He never left the sport. A.J. Foyt Enterprises won the 1999 Indianapolis 500 with Kenny Brack, and the team still fields two full-time entries in the NTT INDYCAR SERIES, running Santino Ferrucci in the number 14 and Caio Collet in the number 4 in 2026. Foyt turned 91 in January 2026.

Fun Stats

A few numbers that do not fit anywhere else. In August 1987, at age 52, Foyt drove the experimental Oldsmobile Aerotech to a closed-course speed record of 257.123 mph at a test track near Fort Stockton, Texas. He won 159 races in USAC competition across all of its divisions, another record. Twenty-three of his 67 Indy car wins came from the pole. And his four Indianapolis 500 victories were spread across 16 years, from 1961 to 1977, with a full decade between the third one and the fourth.

The Bottom Line

Plenty of drivers have been faster in one car on one kind of track. Nobody has been good in more of them than A.J. Foyt. Roadsters, rear-engine cars, stock cars, sports cars, dirt, pavement, ovals, road courses, Indianapolis, Daytona and Le Mans. He won in all of it, he built the cars he won in, and 33 years after he climbed out for the last time his win record still stands.