“There are a lot of stories about A.J. People tell me, ‘you should write a book,’” said longtime A.J. Foyt Racing PR specialist Anne Fornoro while accepting the 2024 Robin Miller Award at IMS in May. “I say, ‘He pays me not to write a book.’”
But A.J. didn’t pay Art Garner not to write a book, and the long wait for an official A.J. biography will end when the first volume of ‘A.J. Foyt: Survivor, Champion, Legend’ is officially released on October 1 though Octane Press. The book is available now, and here’s a taste of what’s inside:
Langhorne Speedway was the most feared racetrack in America. Opened in 1926 just outside of Philadelphia, it was the first dirt track built exclusively for auto racing. A unique circular design differentiated it from the dual-purpose oval tracks hosting both horse and car races.
Most oval tracks have two straights and four corners. Sometimes the corners are banked. Drivers accelerate on the straights and brake for the corners. Langhorne, nicknamed “The Horne,” was one mile of constant turning with no banking. The trick for a driver was to stay off the brake and on the gas, the cars sliding and dancing on the edge of control the entire lap — lap after lap. The track also ran downhill and uphill, one end being thirty feet below the other. Because it was round and flat, drivers weren’t able to see very far ahead, and when dust began to build as the track dried out, visibility was often limited to just a few car lengths. Despite all the challenges, the track was incredibly fast, faster than the one-mile paved oval at Milwaukee.
Then there was “Puke Hollow.” No matter how well the track’s fine-grained dirt-and-oil surface was groomed before an event, it inevitably became filled with potholes and deeply rutted during practice and qualifying. Located just past the start/finish line at the low end of the track, legend said Puke Hollow’s constantly changing surface became so rough drivers would get ill from the jostling. Others said they threw up just thinking about the track.
“That was the most dangerous track on earth,” said Bobby Unser. Andretti agreed: “I can’t imagine another track being that dangerous. I never lost sleep over debuting anywhere in the world, even with Formula 1. The night before Langhorne, I was actually really concerned.”
Several drivers simply refused to race there, including the top two finishers from the Indy 500, Rathmann and Ward. While Rathmann wasn’t running for the season-long championship, Ward knew his decision would cost him points in the defense of his title.
“I don’t need this bull****,” said Ward, who last raced at Langhorne in 1958. “There’s no reason to go to a racetrack that you’re not comfortable on. It makes no sense to me.”
One surprise entry was Bryan, the three-time national champion who’d won at the track in 1954 and 1955. “If I could drive a sprint car every weekend at Langhorne, I mean, no place else — I’d do it in a minute,” Foyt recalled Bryan telling him.
But Bryan hadn’t raced there since 1957 and had been running a limited schedule since winning at Indianapolis in 1958. When offered a ride by Watson in Ward’s car, Bryan said he first wanted to make sure it was okay with the regular driver.
“I wish you wouldn’t ask,” Ward says he told Bryan. “That joint scares the **** out of me.”
Bryan, tall and stocky, sporting a crew cut and an ever-present unlit cigar, was popular with both the fans and drivers and a master racetrack prankster and needler. He was also extremely confident.
“Nobody ever drove an automobile with more authority than Jimmy Bryan,” wrote one reporter hyping his return.” Bryan characteristically laughed off Ward’s warning.
“Ward says I’m crazy, that I’ll kill myself. Hell, I’m only 33, and I’m in good shape. Surely I can get around a track that I know as well as that one. Besides, I’ll be careful.”
Having earned the tag “Earth Mover” early in his career for his skill on dirt, Bryan proved he could still hustle a car around the track, qualifying second to Branson.
Foyt struggled with the new car, qualifying ninth. Most dirt cars used a spring front suspension with torsion bars in the rear. The new car featured torsion bars front and rear and the team was having trouble tuning it for the challenging Langhorne surface.
As the drivers gathered for their prerace meeting, word spread that Al Herman, whom most of them raced against in the 500, had been killed the night before in a first-lap accident in a midget race in West Haven, Connecticut. Someone mentioned that two other drivers had been killed in Europe and that Stirling Moss, generally considered the best foreign driver, had been badly injured in yet another crash, breaking both his legs. At the drivers’ meeting officials asked everyone to take it easy at the start. Trying to lighten the mood, Bryan wondered aloud if it was still okay to race into Turn 1.
Starting alongside Branson on the outside of the front row, Bryan did just that, driving hard into Puke Hollow and sliding high on the track, his car bouncing fore and aft. He still seemed to be in control when the car lurched skyward, rolled several times, and started cartwheeling end over end, and as high as fifteen feet in the air. Bryan’s lifeless body, restrained by a seatbelt, flapped about like a bronc rider. Both his neck and back were broken, and he was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital. Like Pat O’Connor’s death, it had a lasting impact on Foyt.
“It was a terrible accident,” he recalled. “He’d retired and wasn’t racing no more. Then he came out of retirement. That’s the reason I always said that I’d never come out of retirement. I always said when I’m through, I’m through.”
Foyt would go on to dominate at Langhorne in coming years, winning a record eight times between 1960 and 1964. “It was a helluva racetrack,” he said. “You had to be in good shape to race it. That was the biggest thing. It was fast. I kind of enjoyed it, but it was a very dangerous track.”
Following Langhorne came a string of seven sprint car events in which Foyt found it increasingly difficult to beat not only Branson, but also Jones and Hurtubise and their Chevrolet engines. Jones won three straight at one point, and following a dominating victory at New Bremen with Foyt second, the headline in the local paper read “It’s That Jones Boy Again.”
Foyt lobbied Watson to switch to a Chevrolet engine, but the car owner was loyal to Offenhauser and refused. Even on the high banks of Salem for the annual Labor Day weekend race, where Foyt had been hard to beat, it was Jones’s turn to impress. He led from start to finish, lapping the field and setting a world speed record for a half-mile track.
The next day, when Foyt needed it most, he got a break that turned his season around — and perhaps his career.
Thirty-four cars showed up on Monday, September 5 for the traditional Labor Day Indy car race at the fairgrounds in Du Quoin, Illinois, known as the Magic Mile, with only 18 supposed to make the field. Foyt considered himself jinxed at the track, having failed to qualify for the previous year’s race. Branson qualified on the pole with Ruby in second, Hurtubise was third, and Foyt fourth. With track temperatures topping 100 degrees, Branson led early but was soon passed by Jim Packard, who came charging up from sixth in an eight-year-old car to take the lead. Foyt then passed Branson and set off after the leader.
Although Packard was a couple years older than Foyt, they’d been on similar paths, competing against each other since both had started their careers in IMCA in 1955 before eventually moving to USAC. Packard had finished third at Milwaukee and second at Langhorne earlier in the year, before breaking through for his first champ car win two weeks earlier at the Illinois State Fairgrounds. Handsome, with a jet-black Elvis-style haircut, Packard was a fan favorite for his hard driving style as much as his good looks.
Packard stretched his lead to more than 20 seconds over Foyt while lapping every other car. The pace eventually took its toll, however, the right-rear tire on Packard’s car shredding on lap 75 of 100. Foyt inherited the lead and cruised to his first “big car” victory, finishing nearly a lap ahead of Tony Bettenhausen. Wearing a 10-gallon cowboy hat, his uniform soaked in oil, Foyt displayed a pair of blistered and bloody hands in Victory Circle, having elected to go without power steering because of its slight drain on horsepower. The crowd cheered for Foyt and roared for Packard, with A.J. adding to the praise.
“That boy Packard was outrunning me, but we just outlasted him. That boy was really going. It’s too bad it had to happen to him, but that’s racing luck.”
Foyt pocketed more than $5000 for the win and noted he’d won back the $20 he’d lost to J.C. Agajanian the night before playing gin rummy. The victory jumped Foyt into third place in championship points, with Packard close behind in fourth. Rathmann, still in second thanks to his points from the Indianapolis 500, was not running the dirt track races and as a result would not be a challenger in the final standings. After skipping Langhorne, Ward, clinging to first place, had run into a string of bad luck, failing to score points.
Foyt, “the exuberant young Texan with the smile from Texarkana to El Paso,” was suddenly the hot story. Two weeks later he again benefited from the misfortune of other drivers in the biggest dirt track race of the year, the Hoosier Hundred at the Indiana State Fairgrounds. Ward qualified on the pole and immediately took the lead, with Alvin “Cotton” Farmer second and Foyt third. It was a wild race with multiple spins and cars flipping, but no serious injuries.
After a rock cracked the front of the car’s exterior tank, Foyt realized the oil sprayed out only when he slowed and the oil surged forward. He adjusted his driving to maintain a constant speed and avoid braking. It wasn’t the fastest way around the track, and he wouldn’t be able to challenge the leaders, but car owner Bob Bowes credited the move with keeping him in the race, with the goal of picking up valuable championship points.
If Foyt hadn’t modified his style, “he might have gone 10 to 15 laps more,” Bowes would say. “After he caught that rock we were just hoping he could finish.”
Those hopes changed drastically on lap 68 when Ward abruptly slowed, his car dead. At nearly the same moment Farmer pulled in the pits, having been badly cut by a rock thrown up by one of the cars. Foyt suddenly found himself in the lead, which he held to the finish.
Admitting it “looked kind of bad” in the early going, he said the end result was “too good to be true.”
“I didn’t believe it,” Foyt said as a pool of oil formed under his stationary car.
“My crew gave me the board that I was third one lap and the next time they told me I was leading.”
Looking to keep the momentum going, Foyt and most of the other Indy car regulars entered a sprint car race at Allentown, Pennsylvania, on September 24.
The track was in poor condition, as often happened late in the season, badly rutted and dusty. He spun before the field received the green flag, forcing a restart. On the second attempt the race was only a half lap old when Johnny Thomson lost control, caught a rut, and began to flip, crashing through the inside wooden fencing, the driver thrown free from the car. The crash was eerily similar to one two months earlier that Thomson had walked away from. He’d briefly retired after that accident, returning a week later saying, “I have two or three good years ahead, then I’ll quit.” This time the car landed on him, and he was taken from the track in an ambulance.
Once the race was finally underway there was no stopping Packard, as he led all 25 laps with Hurtubise second and Foyt third. The victory celebration, already muted, ended when word arrived that Thomson had died from his injuries.
Known as the “Flying Scot,” the popular Thomson, 38, was the antithesis of the stereotypical race car driver. He was five foot six and 150 pounds, quiet, polite, and unassuming. Few were aware he’d been a highly decorated World War II B-25 bomber crew chief. He spent his spare time on a farm not far from the Allentown track with his wife and four children, all under age 10. He seemed not to mind when other drivers joked about his quiet lifestyle.
“On the track there’d been no questioning his skill,” wrote Wayne Fuson in the Indianapolis News. “He was kidded occasionally about this devotion to home and family, but the kidders secretly admired him for it. He was a race driver’s race driver. It was a job to him, a job that he both respected and feared. He was not the bragging kind, but he was one of the most respected in the business.”
Tommy Hinnershitz, a seven-time sprint car champion and Thomson’s close friend, immediately announced his retirement. The rest of the drivers headed for Trenton, less than a two-hour drive, where there was an Indy car race the next day. Branson and Foyt qualified one-two and Foyt was leading with just 10 laps left when he was forced to pit for fuel, eventually finishing third. Sachs, an Allentown native and another friend of Thomson’s, earned the victory with Ward second.
With only a pair of short midget races scheduled for the first weekend in October, Foyt headed home for Houston, his first off weekend since early July. That’s where he learned that Packard had been killed in the race at Fairfield, Illinois.
After hitching a ride with Jones to the track, Packard was driving Jones’s old midget when something apparently broke in the steering. The car went into a series of flips, killing Packard immediately. It fell to Jones to return Packard’s suitcase to his wife, who had one small child at home and was pregnant with another. Jones called Packard’s death “one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to deal with.”
Packard was the fourth Indy car driver to be killed in the four months since the 500, a fact not lost on Sacramento Bee columnist Wilbur Adams.
“The big cars are supposed to race on the state fair ground track on the last Sunday of the month,” Adams wrote in a preview of the upcoming event. “We say supposed to because the casualty rate among the drivers has been so high there may be none alive by October 30.”
Years later Foyt said, “I didn’t really know Jim Packard. I knew him as a hard race driver. But he got killed in a little dirt race.”
“Whenever anybody was hurt or killed it was a bad time,” Lucy said. “For a while it happened a lot. You didn’t know who would be there from race to race.”