AJ Foyt 80 on Friday and feeling it

Super Tex

Super Tex turns 80 on Friday, and he feels it.

A.J. Foyt said he's lost 50 pounds since burning in his upper chest Nov. 7 led to triple bypass heart surgery and an extended hospitalization due to lung complications. He slept through 10 days prior to Thanksgiving and only recently shed the walker confining him to short distances.

For a racing hero accustomed to traveling fast, it's been a painfully slow ride.

"I'm going crazy," Foyt said. "I've got nurses that come two times a day, and I can't hardly eat because nothing tastes good; it all tastes (bad) I guess because of all the antibiotics they've been pumping in my stomach."

Foyt hoped to visit his IndyCar team at its shop Friday, but the half-hour drive figures to be all the excitement he can handle. He certainly won't be making the trip to the season-opening race in Brasilia, Brazil on March 8, and he might not attend a race until the Indianapolis 500, a race he won four times as a driver and another as an owner.

Foyt holds IndyCar Series records for most career victories (67), most in one season (10) and most national championships (seven, two as an owner). He remains the only driver to have won the Indy 500, Daytona 500, 24 Hours of Le Mans and 24 Hours of Daytona.

On the morning of the chest burning, Foyt shrugged it off long enough to help dig a ditch for 300 feet of electrical lines needed for a new barn built on one of his properties west of Houston. At lunch, Foyt figured a call to the doctor was necessary, and the instructions were to get to the hospital immediately. Of course, he didn't go straight there. After driving back to the race shop, daughter-in-law Nancy Foyt took him home for a shower.

"Hell, I'm 50 miles out here in the woods," he told the doctor. "Besides, it didn't hurt that bad."

Foyt spent the next 25 days in Baylor-St. Luke's Medical Center, a stretch so serious that Foyt considers it his most life-threatening experience, which is saying a lot given his history, including a 1965 crash at Riverside, Calif., in which Parnelli Jones was the first to realize Foyt was still alive.

"They said if I hadn't have called, a buzzard would be looking for you in that ditch," Foyt said.

Foyt's 80th birthday also puts IndyCar history in perspective. He is poised to become one of three former Indianapolis 500 winners in the 80 club. Jones is 81, Bobby Unser will be the same age on Feb. 20, the day Roger Penske turns 78.

Gordon Johncock will be 79 in August, Johnny Rutherford 77 in March, Al Unser 76 in May and Mario Andretti 75 on Feb. 28.

Foyt figures he's still on bonus time. His mother was 64 years old when she died, his father 69. Many racing contemporaries lost their lives in crashes. USA Today