On July 21, 2021, four men stood together on the Yard of Bricks at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway: A.J. Foyt, Al Unser Sr., Rick Mears, and Helio Castroneves. They are the only drivers in 109 runnings of the Indianapolis 500 to win the race four times. The photo took thousands of frames. The shoot lasted hours. None of them had ever stood together as a complete club before that day, and none of them ever would again. Less than five months later, on December 9, 2021, Al Unser Sr. passed away.
The four-time winner's club at Indy is the most exclusive title in motorsport. More people have walked on the moon than have won the Indianapolis 500 four times. With the 110th Running coming Sunday, May 24, 2026, here's the story of how each of them got there.
The most American club in racing
Indy is the only race where this happens. Le Mans has multi-time winners. Monaco's records are F1 records. The 24 Hours of Daytona produces repeat winners regularly. But the Indy 500 has run since 1911, and only four men have ever stood at the top of that mountain. Of the 784 drivers to start the Indianapolis 500, only 20 have won it more than once. Four of those 20 are the four-time club. Everyone else got close enough to know how hard a fourth one is.
The race rewards endurance, patience, and luck more than nearly any other event in sports. Cautions, traffic, mechanical failure, and weather can flip a result in three laps. To win this race four separate times is an arithmetic close to impossible.
A.J. Foyt: The first four-timer
Foyt won his first Indy 500 in 1961, his last in 1977, and ran 35 starts in between. Both numbers are records that may never be broken. He showed up as a 23-year-old rookie from Houston in 1958, pulled himself into open-wheel racing's top tier within three years, and stayed at the front for two decades.
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His four wins came spread across the front-engine roadster era and the rear-engine revolution. The 1961 victory put him on the map. The 1964 win in a Watson-Offy roadster was the last time a front-engine car ever won at Indy. By 1967, he was driving rear-engine cars too. By 1977, he was 42 years old, the first four-time winner in race history, and the man every other driver measured himself against.
Foyt finished his racing career with 67 IndyCar and Champ Car wins and seven series championships. He's the only driver to win the Indianapolis 500, the Daytona 500, the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and the 24 Hours of Daytona. He still owns A.J. Foyt Racing today, and his bronze brick was the first to be embedded in the Yard of Bricks in April 2019.