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."

Granted, Foyt never really had the chance to reach his full potential in NASCAR, thanks to protectionist rules instituted by USAC -- at the time the sanctioning body of the Indianapolis 500 -- which forbade its drivers from competing in other series. Foyt, who admits he was USAC's "poster boy," could race only in NASCAR events on tracks that were fully sanctioned by the International Automobile Federation (FIA). NASCAR founder Bill France Sr. wanted Foyt to race at Daytona, so he applied for FIA sanctioning. A handful of other tracks did, too. But most were off-limits. Even though Foyt won seven times in NASCAR, he never ran more than seven races in a full season.

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So when it comes to NASCAR driving titles, perhaps Stewart and Foyt aren't exactly on equal footing. But in another area, they are. If Stewart succeeds as a car owner on NASCAR's highest level, winning the races and championships that he believes he can with his Stewart-Haas organization, he'll have achieved something even Foyt wasn't able to do.

And Foyt certainly tried. In 2000, the racing giant started his own full-fledged NASCAR team, running a No. 14 Pontiac with an Indianapolis-based insurance provider as primary sponsor. In five years, he tried nine different drivers, with little success. The team's lone top-five finish came at Watkins Glen, courtesy of road-course ace P.J. Jones. Foyt was as demanding as ever -- according to one possibly-apocryphal tale, he didn't like the line driver Ron Hornaday was using to get around Chicagoland Speedway, and recommended an approach he had used in one of his victories there. Never mind that the speedway had just opened, and Foyt's win had come at some other, forgotten track in the area. The point was still made.

But by 2004, Foyt's team was running low on sponsorship, and after a 30th-place finish at the Texas spring race the organization shut down for good. Earlier this year, he finally sold the building he had used in Charlotte. Foyt won plenty of races as an owner in the open-wheel ranks, but in NASCAR he was never quite able to find the same magic.

"I never got any good people," he explained. "And me not being in Charlotte all the time, trying to run the Indy team, it's just hard to run two different operations. I don't care who you are. My good friend Roger Penske, he works at it hard, but you see he's very successful in one. You very rarely see the same people real, real successful in both operations. Look at Chip [Ganassi's] deal. Chip and them work hard at it, but he's a lot more successful [in IndyCars]. When I came over here and drove my own car and did the deal, and drove for the Wood Brothers, I was pretty good. But it was just hard for me to oversee another operation, and that's the reason I finally got rid of everything."

Stewart, he believes, will be different. "He has surrounded himself with very good, talented people," Foyt said. "l know a few of them, and the key people he has I think are very, very good, and that's where I think Tony's been smarter than a lot of the guys who actually own the cars. With him in the driver's seat, he knows what he wants, and he's got some great mechanics behind him. I think you're going to see a winning operation."

That's high praise coming from Foyt, whose own accomplishments often completely eclipse those of others around him. But he clearly has a soft spot for Stewart, who seems to remind him a lot of himself. He likes the fact that Stewart speaks his mind. He likes the fact that Stewart can drive and win in almost anything. He likes the fact that Stewart has "excuse my French, been known to be an a--hole," Foyt said. Stewart only smiles and shakes his head. "Don't worry," he said. "It's not the first time I've heard him call me that."

And maybe as early as Sunday, he'll have to call Stewart something else -- a winning driver and car owner in NASCAR's premier series, a title not even Foyt himself can lay claim. So the next time A.J. jabs Stewart in the ribs to remind him of all his career accolades, the younger driver can put on his metaphorical owner's hat and use Foyt's favorite line: "Check the record books, big boy." Foyt will probably smile, pleased for once to be outdone.

"I'm proud to see him doing what he's doing," Foyt said of Stewart. "Let's face it, they're going to have to deal with him for a few more years. Unless he gets too fat."

Again, Stewart smiles and shakes his head. "Hello, pot on kettle," he says. And on and on it goes.

The opinions expressed are solely of the writer.