Indy 500 Four-Time Winners: The Legends of the Brickyard
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.
Jarred PorterMay 6, 2026Updated May 17, 20265 min read
Photo by IndyCar Series
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.
Al Unser Sr.: The quiet force
If Foyt was the firebrand, Al Unser Sr. was the steady hand. Born into the Unser racing dynasty out of Albuquerque, he won the 500 four times across 18 years: 1970, 1971, 1978, and 1987. His brother Bobby won three. His son Al Jr. won two. The Unser family combined for nine wins at Indianapolis, more than any other family in race history.
Al's first two wins came back to back in 1970 and 1971, the first repeat champion since Bill Vukovich did it in 1953 and 1954. His 1978 win was part of an "Indy Triple Crown" season where he also won the Pocono 500 and the California 500.
The 1987 victory is the one most people remember. He'd been hired as a backup driver for Penske, didn't have a ride that May, and ended up in a year-old show car that had been borrowed from a hotel lobby in Pennsylvania where it had been on display. He won at 47 years, 11 months, 26 days. That made him the oldest driver to win the Indianapolis 500, a record that still stands.
The window of overlap among all four-time winners was only 193 days. The 2021 photo on the Yard of Bricks was the only complete gathering they ever had.
Rick Mears: The polesitter
Rick Mears was one of the most unassuming great drivers in any sport, anywhere, ever. Quiet, technical, surgical. He drove for Roger Penske his entire IndyCar career. He won the 500 in 1979, 1984, 1988, and 1991.
What sets Mears apart is how he qualified. He won six pole positions at Indianapolis, still the most by any driver in race history. Three of his four 500 wins came from the pole. All four came from the front row. He never had to fight through the pack at Indy because he never had to start in the pack at Indy.
The 1991 win is in motorsport highlight reels for a reason. With 13 laps to go, Michael Andretti made an outside pass on Mears in Turn 1. Mears quietly drafted back up to him and returned the favor with an identical outside pass on the same line on the very next lap. Mears held on for win number four. Three decades later, Castroneves would use the same outside-line move to pass Alex Palou for his own fourth win. Mears was watching from a Penske garage when it happened.
Mears is also a three-time IndyCar Series champion. He has been a driver coach for Team Penske ever since he retired in 1992. He still spots for the team on race day from Turn 3.
For the technical terms behind these moves, our Indy 500 racing lingo guide breaks down the language used on the broadcast.
Helio Castroneves: The showman
Helio Castroneves is the only foreign-born driver in the four-time club. The Brazilian won the 500 in 2001, 2002, 2009, and 2021. He is also the only one of the four whose celebration changed the sport's culture.
Castroneves invented the fence climb. After his first IndyCar win at Detroit's Belle Isle Park in June 2000, he stopped his car on the front straight and climbed the catch fence in pure exuberance. RPM 2Night host John Kernan tagged him "Spider-Man" the next day. The nickname stuck and so did the move. Tony Stewart adopted it for NASCAR. So did drivers in series across the world. The fence climb is now the most copied victory celebration in motorsport, and Helio did it first.
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His 2001 Indy 500 win came in his very first start at the track. He won it again in 2002. No driver had won back-to-back 500s since Al Unser in 1970 and 1971. He won a third in 2009 from the pole. Then twelve years passed.
Castroneves was 46 years old in May 2021, racing a part-time schedule for Meyer Shank Racing after a long run at Team Penske had ended. The 105th running became the fastest Indy 500 ever run, with an average race speed of 190.690 mph. With four laps to go, Alex Palou passed him for the lead in Turn 1. With one lap to go, Castroneves passed him back, on the same line, and held on by 0.4928 seconds. He climbed the fence. The crowd of 135,000 on a sunny May afternoon went genuinely wild.
The bronze bricks at the start/finish line
When IMS welder and sculptor Bud Tucker got the call to honor the four-time club permanently, he started in the Speedway's welding shop. Tucker uses molten silicone bronze to cast 18-pound replica bricks from one of the original 1909 Culver bricks pulled from the track. Each replica picks up every nick, every blemish, every imperfection from the original.
A.J. Foyt's brick was placed in the Yard of Bricks in April 2019. Al Unser Sr.'s and Rick Mears's came later that year. Castroneves's was added in summer 2021, the day after his fourth win, after IMS President Doug Boles called Tucker and asked if he could pour another. The bricks sit four rows from the center of the Yard of Bricks, an intentional nod to "the fours." Each is engraved with the driver's name and the four years he won. Walk the start/finish line on a tour and you'll find them right there in the surface.
The original Marmon Wasp from 1911, the cars these legends drove to victory, and the trophies that followed are all on display at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum, which reopened recently after extensive renovations.
Who joins the club next?
Castroneves enters 2026 at age 50 with 24 starts at Indy and a fifth attempt to win at Meyer Shank Racing. If he wins on May 24, he becomes the oldest Indy 500 winner ever and the first five-time winner in race history. Foyt holds the record for most career starts at 35, a number Castroneves could match in a few more seasons. None of the active drivers under 40 has more than two wins. Josef Newgarden (2023, 2024) is closest at three for the next-generation chase.
Even getting to two is rare. Of the 784 drivers ever to start the race, only 20 have won it more than once. Getting to four has only happened four times in 115 years.
The 110th Running of the Indianapolis 500 takes the green flag on Sunday, May 24, 2026. Defending champion Alex Palou starts the race as a one-time winner. So does most of the field. Whoever wins joins a list that has fewer four-time members than there are people who have walked on the moon.
The Borg-Warner Trophy will be in Victory Lane that afternoon. The bronze bricks will already be embedded in the Yard of Bricks waiting for whoever kisses them. And four winners' faces will be looking down from sterling silver, knowing exactly how hard the fifth one is.
Drop a comment with your favorite four-time winner moment, and subscribe to our newsletter to follow the rest of our 2026 Indy 500 coverage all the way to the green flag.
Jarred Porter is a content creator and SEO specialist for Get Indiana, helping Hoosiers discover the best places to eat, explore, and experience across the state.
