IndyCar: A.J. Foyt team poised for feat not accomplished in 22 years

Nine of the 10 full-time IndyCar teams have found victory lane at some point, with the only exception being Juncos Hollinger Racing. Five of those nine teams have won since the start of the 2023 season.

Two of the other four, Ed Carpenter Racing and Meyer Shank Racing, have won this decade. That leaves only A.J. Foyt Enterprises and Dale Coyne Racing, and the latter's most recent win came five years after the former's.

The last time A.J. Foyt Enterprises won an IndyCar race was in April 2013, when Takuma Sato won on the streets of Long Beach, California to secure his first career series victory. He even led the championship standings that year heading into the 97th running of the Indy 500 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

But the Indy 500 started a rough stretch for the Japanese driver, who had one point recorded nine DNFs in a 10-race span, and he plummeted to 17th place in the championship standings by the end of the season.

As long ago as Sato's Foyt win was, it has been even longer since a Foyt driver finished in the top 10 in the championship standings. Not since Airton Dare finished in ninth place in 2002 has it been pulled off, yet 11 races into the 17-race 2024 season, Santino Ferrucci finds himself in 10th.

A.J. Foyt Enterprises formed a technical alliance with Team Penske ahead of the 2024 season, and it seems to be paying off.

Ferrucci sits just one place behind two-time and reigning Indy 500 winner Josef Newgarden in the standings, and he is coming off of an impressive weekend at Iowa Speedway where his No. 14 Chevrolet was one of the very few cars that was actually able to execute an overtake.

The 26-year-old has recorded seven top 10 finishes this season and has just one DNF, and his success has turned A.J. Foyt Enterprises from arguably the slowest team on the grid to arguably the top team behind tier one (Chip Ganassi Racing and Team Penske) and tier two (Arrow McLaren and Andretti Global).

Since Dare's ninth place finish in 2002, the top finish for a Foyt driver in the standings is Vitor Meira's 12th in 2010.

Ferrucci''s best career finishes in the championship standings are 13th place efforts with Dale Coyne Racing in 2019 and 2020. Let's not forget that, when competing for Dale Coyne Racing alongside Alex Palou in 2020, the Woodbury, Connecticut native actually finished three places higher than the Spaniard in the championship standings.

Palou has since joined Chip Ganassi Racing and won two of the three championships that have been contested since, and he is the current points leader.

Though Ferrucci was strong in last year's Indy 500, placing a career-high third, the rest of the season was a struggle, and he did not record another top 10 finish. After a solid eighth place run in this year's running of the "Greatest Spectacle in Racing", however, he called his shot, predicting that the team's strength would carry over throughout the rest of the season.

With an average finish of 10.0 in the six races contested since the Indy 500, he certainly appears to have been correct. Can he hang on to deliver "Super Tex" his first top 10 in points in more than two decades?

The 12th race on the 2024 IndyCar schedule is the Ontario Honda Dealers Indy Toronto, which is set to be contested on the streets of Exhibition Place in Toronto this Sunday, July 21 at 1:00 p.m. ET. This race is one of two Peacock exclusives on this year's calendar, meaning that fans will need to pay for a subscription to the streaming service to watch.