When AJ Foyt conquered Le Mans

"I wasn't much of a road racer," says AJ Foyt.

That would be the AJ Foyt who is one of only a dozen drivers to win all three of the classic endurance races - Le Mans, Daytona and Sebring. It says a lot about just how great the 82-year-old Texan was on the ovals that he can suggest such a thing.

Foyt came, saw and conquered the Le Mans 24 Hours in 1967, sharing a Carroll Shelby-run Ford MkIV with Dan Gurney. He never returned, becoming one of only seven drivers to have a 100% record at Le Mans. Until, that is, this year when he will back be at Le Mans for the 50th anniversary of that victory.

Foyt had been slated to make his Le Mans debut a year earlier for the Holman Moody half of the works Ford effort, but suffered burns in an Indycar practice crash at the Milwaukee Mile in early June.

So he had to wait until 1967. At that point, Foyt was already a superstar in America with three Indianapolis 500 victories to his name, the latest two weeks earlier, and was on his way to a fifth national championship.

"In 1967, Ford said they definitely wanted me to run for them and I was glad to," recalls the larger-than-life Foyt, sat in his motorhome on the infield of Indianapolis Motor Speedway during the Month of May 2017.

"It was a big challenge to me. I knew that they [the European drivers] wanted to beat me as much as I wanted to beat them."

Foyt, of course, was seen as one of the outsiders. But many mistook his personality off track, which he describes as "hot headed", for not being a thinking driver in the car.

Yes, he had some big accidents in his career, but in wheel-to-wheel battle he rarely made the wrong call and was well-respected by most of his rivals for how he went racing.

He took an intelligent approach to his Le Mans assault, realising that the key was to ensure the machinery lasted and also recognising that Gurney, a driver he had huge respect for, was the road racing specialist. That was to become doubly important in the first half of the race as the other works Fords hit trouble.

Amid the star-studded Ford line-up, only the Foyt/Gurney car and the fourth-placed Bruce McLaren/Mark Donohue example made the finish. When Mario Andretti, who was running second, headed out of the pits after a brake-pad change and tried to make up time only to crash at the Esses (Andretti blamed incorrectly fitted pads), the accident also took out the MkIIBs of Roger McCluskey and Jo Schlesser.

"I had enough road racing experience to know you can't abuse the car, because it ain't going to last," says Foyt. "You've got to make the car do the work. You can do a little, but you can't be tearing up the car or it was going to break. So you've got to be smooth. Fast, don't get me wrong, but you can't abuse the car.

"I don't think that I ever ran over 70%. I know some of the newspapers said we were Ford's rabbit, but I can say we were just fast and we didn't have to punish the car too much. The car performed beautifully all night and all day. We weren't going to tear it up. Dan, I know, drove safe and I tried to do it as much as I could.

"One time, I over-revved the engine trying to stop as you go down Mulsanne over a hill. Another car broke a motor, and I was grabbing everything to try to stop it. I over-revved it by I think four or five hundred rpm. I told them, but Ford said don't worry about it. I just didn't want it to be my fault if the engine blew up! Luckily enough, nothing hurt it."

Foyt, who reckons he had only around 10 laps of practice before the race, clearly adapted well to Le Mans. Like so many of the great drivers, he makes the incredibly difficult sound easy. His attitude towards his adaptability is stated matter-of-factly, not with arrogance.

"I guess I was one of the lucky ones that could adapt pretty quick," says Foyt. "Maybe I can just say it was a gift I was born with. A lot of friends of mine, even in midgets and sprint cars, would run this car or that car and they would be damned good in one but in the other they couldn't.

"I remember racing on quarter miles, which were tight. Then get onto the half miles and the guy who used to win everything on the quarter miles couldn't drive. I always liked the big tracks myself; I won more than a lot on quarter miles, but to me the bigger tracks were easier even though a lot of guys just didn't like the bigger tracks. It's the same with road racing."

Gurney got into the lead early on, and from then on it was remarkably plain sailing for the duo. The car didn't miss a beat, and there were none of the problems that struck most of the Fords throughout practice and the race.

The only real missed beat came at a pitstop. At one stage during the night, Foyt arrived in the pits expecting to hand over to Gurney. But things didn't go according to plan.

"I got out and said, 'Well where's Dan?'," says Foyt. "They said they couldn't find him! I said, 'What do you mean you can't find him?'. I think it was two or three in the morning, something like that and man I'm tired.

"I later told Dan that 'you knew what you were doing, you made me pull shifts right there!' But we're great friends. I think the world of Dan and I'm just pleased he picked me to drive with him. I tease him a lot about it and he just laughs. He says he was there, they just didn't come back there.

"So they told me I had go get back in because we're well out there in the lead and doing well. I said, 'Man, I'm tired, my arms are hurting and all that'. The cars weren't as nice back then as they are today. We did have some other drivers if something happened to one of us, but Dan and I did the whole thing together."

Foyt did return to the fray, and Gurney later reappeared to return to the wheel as they reeled off the rest of the distance to finish the race four laps clear of the Ferrari of Ludovico Scarfiotti and Mike Parkes.

"With our car, there was no comparison [with the Ferrari]," says Foyt. "We were kind of in a league by ourselves. The car handled real good all day, and it was very fast down the straightaway. The one I was worried about more than anything was the Chaparral [the lead car shared by Phil Hill and Mike Spence]. But we just got our car working so good that it wasn't really a contest. It was a hard race, but it was an easy race to win. We just had to stay out of trouble because we were so much faster."

Gurney had started the race, so Foyt took the chequered flag. And, of course, he was there when Gurney created the now-ubiquitous spraying of champagne in celebration. And it stands as a very important victory on Foyt's remarkable CV - one of the wins that proves he was so much more than a one-trick pony.

There is much myth surrounding Foyt. But while, in many ways, he lives up to every expectation in the way he talks, his outlook and his physical presence - even in his ninth decade and, as he puts it, "all crippled and burned up and beat up with scars all over".

But what is also obvious is the intellect underpinning all that, and after only a few minutes of talking to him it's clear there is far more to AJ Foyt than the caricature.

You don't have the success Foyt had in so many disciplines, after all, by being nothing more than a punchy Texan. For most, a Le Mans win would be career defining, but not for Foyt, delighted as he is to have triumphed there.

"It was a great win for me, because there are a lot of 24-hour races but you only have one Le Mans," says Foyt. "And Le Mans is known all over the world. It's like the Kentucky Derby horse race, there's only one Kentucky Derby.

"It's like Indianapolis. I won Ontario or Pocono lots of times, I've won the Daytona 500, but you know AJ Foyt from Indianapolis Motor Speedway. It's hard to beat tradition, and in the same way Le Mans has been there for many years. Daytona has come a long way, but the 24 hours still don't compare with Le Mans.

"It was a great honour to win that race, it was very prestigious. I've won the Daytona 24 Hours and the 12 Hours of Sebring, but everyone talks about Le Mans and often they don't know the others we won. I'm just very happy to be one of the winners."

As for the unique track, it certainly left an impression. Even a driver used to the often savage ovals, both paved and loose, of that era of American racing found it an eye-opener. And this is someone who used to relish the challenge of the infamous Langhorne dirt track in Pennsylvania.

"The one thing I didn't like about the track was that they didn't have no guard rails or nothing," Foyt says. "And secondly, I didn't like the way they whitewashed the trees so that, at night, when you are at 200mph your lights would reflect across the trees.

"And you had to be on your toes in traffic. One time, I ran up on a bunch of cars and thought I was going to scatter them all over! I missed them all, but I didn't think I was going to. We were so much faster on the straight, it was a hairy race."

Later in his career, after a long absence from sportscar racing, Foyt returned to drive for Preston Henn (pictured below in their Porsche 962 at Sebring in 1986). During that period, he won the 1983 and '85 Daytona 24 Hours, and the '85 Sebring 12 Hours. For all three victories, he shared with Frenchman Bob Wollek.

Unbeknown to Foyt, Wollek had been frank about how unimpressed he was with the prospect of sharing with him. It was only after the race, when bombarded with questions about how he'd proved Wollek wrong, that Foyt realised his team-mate wasn't a big fan. Initially, at least.

"I guess they kept us apart at Daytona because they knew I was hot headed and I guess he was saying, 'He's stupid, he'll crash the car and he ain't the race driver they think he is'. But I didn't know none of this.

"The press asked 'what kind of race driver do you think AJ Foyt is now?' I went, 'What the hell are you talking about'! But we then got to be real close and drove together a few times."

And what else would a driver who had played one and won one at Le Mans do when he gets to know a driver famous for his failure to win the race despite his consistent excellence? Foyt certainly enjoyed reminding 'Brilliant Bob' of his achievement.

"I used to tease him about the 24-hour race. I'd say, 'Bob, that was the easiest damned race I ever won in my life'," laughs Foyt. "He'd say, 'Oh go to hell, AJ'. I'd tell him there was nothing to it!

"We grew very close and he asked me why I didn't go back. I just said, 'Why, I already won it, you haven't!'. I respected him, he was a good racer, very fast, very smooth. A super guy.

"But it's true to say that's the easiest race I ever won!"

And as for why Foyt has never, before 2017, gone back - he has a simple answer entirely in line with what he used to tell Wollek.

"Well I went over as a rookie and I came out a winner. The way I look at it, I had nothing to go back for."