DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- When A.J. Foyt climbed to the top of Tony Stewart's pit box Thursday to watch his protégé compete in a qualifying race at Daytona International Speedway, there was a set of headphones waiting for him. A special modification had even been made to accommodate the racing legend -- the button allowing him to speak to the driver had been disconnected.

"Can you imagine having to sit there and drive with him yelling at you all day long?" Stewart asked after his second-place finish in the event, for which Foyt had graded him an A-minus. "I've kind of done that in silver crown cars a little bit. I've learned my lesson. I know better than to give him a radio he can yell into."

Foyt tried anyway. "I went to holler at him, and found out the button didn't work," the four-time Indianapolis 500 champion said Friday. "It was nice just sitting there and being quiet for a change instead of raising hell."

Foyt has raised plenty of hell over the course of his unparalleled career, but he's in Daytona this weekend for a much more subdued purpose -- to cheer Stewart, effectively his racing offspring, who will open his career as a driver and owner in Sunday's Daytona 500. Foyt has had such an impact on Stewart's life, in roles varying from car owner to fellow competitor to friend and mentor, that when it came time for the two-time Cup champion to field his own vehicle, he put Foyt's old No. 14 on the side of it.

Stewart once worked for Foyt, driving a U.S. Auto Club silver crown car that the big Texan co-owned, testing one of his IndyCars, even working the dead-man's valve on his pit crew briefly during the 1995 Indy 500. Now that Stewart has achieved so much success in his own career -- USAC's mythical triple crown, an IndyCar championship, two Cup titles in NASCAR, race wins at Indianapolis and Daytona (though not in the car and race, respectively, that he would have chosen) -- his reputation as one of the greats of his era is secure. But even so, nobody fills the room like Foyt, who hobbles on legs crushed in a 1990 crash in Elkhart Lake, Wis., but is surrounded by an aura that four Indy 500 titles and a Daytona 500 victory and a 24 Hours of LeMans championship helped create.

He doesn't let people forget it, either -- most notably Stewart, who he constantly needles about his performance. Win at Dover or Michigan? "Talk to me when you've won a big race," Foyt will tell him. A third in the Budweiser Shootout followed by a second in a Daytona 500 qualifying race, in his first two starts with his new team? "You're heading in the right direction," Foyt will say. It's all good-natured, of course, and nobody understands that more than Stewart, who can be just as sarcastic and biting as his mentor. But there's a reason why, after winning his first Cup championship in 2002, Stewart reveled not only in the title, but also the fact that he had finally accomplished something that Foyt hadn't.

"We like to give each other a hard time about it. But it's hard to do something he hasn't done," Stewart said. "You look at all the stuff that he's accomplished in his career, it's hard to get a leg up on him in that category. No matter what, until I win four Indy 500s and a Daytona 500 and both 24 hours races, he's always going to have a leg up on me on that. I'm not sure I'll ever get caught up to it. But that's one of the things that's always made me admire him and what he's been able to do in his career." (Continued)