Cole Custer to pay tribute to A.J. Foyt at Darlington

KANNAPOLIS, N.C. -- Cole Custer's throwback No. 00 Ford for Darlington Raceway weekend made its debut Wednesday afternoon at the Stewart-Haas Racing shop, with team co-owner Tony Stewart helping to pull the covers off a gleaming new Mustang. Whatever shape the car is in after Darlington, Stewart joked, it can't be much worse than what happened to the original, a No. 00 Ford Galaxie driven by Stewart's racing hero, A.J. Foyt. Late in the 1965 NASCAR season opener at Riverside, Foyt's car lost its brakes and careened into a trackside ditch, flipping violently in a cloud of dust and leaving medical crews fearing the worst. Foyt's trademark toughness carried him through, an attribute that may come in handy for Custer when the NASCAR Xfinity Series hits the track "Too Tough to Tame" on Sept. 1. RELATED: Key moments in SHR history "It's cool to run a really unique car and to run something with a connection to Tony and everything," said Custer, who sits fourth in the series standings. "Obviously, A.J.'s a huge icon in our sport, so it's just cool to do things like that where you have good connections, I would say." Those bonds especially ring true for Stewart, who campaigned the No. 14 -- a car number long associated with Foyt -- for the final eight seasons of his NASCAR career. "I think it's just really cool to honor guys that have been in the sport in the past," Stewart said. "That throwback weekend, the paint schemes are cool, but when you have -- like Cole says -- when you've got a personal connection to the people that are attached to the paint schemes, it makes it that much more fun. … "With Darlington, I told Cole, obviously the Darlington stripe's what everybody gets. I don't care what he does to this car, it's not going to be near as bad as what happened to this car in real life." [caption id="attachment_131506" align="aligncenter" width="892"] Courtesy of Stewart-Haas Racing[/caption] Foyt was all but declared dead by medics on the scene at the California road course some 53-plus years ago. After the crash, Foyt said that he'd never drive another car with numbers that read the same upside-down as right side up. Custer, meanwhile, has embraced the symmetry of the double-zero, which he's donned in the majority of his NASCAR national series starts. The special version of the car number that he'll fly at Darlington borrow the looming eyeball design from Foyt's original. Tuesday afternoon at SHR, Stewart paid particular attention to the smaller No. 00 rendering on the rear bumper. "Whoever is behind you is going to feel like somebody's looking at them the entire time, which I hope is the whole field," Stewart said. "It's weird because the eyes are toward the bottom so it's kind of like they're looking down. We were joking around earlier that if the car gets upside down, they're going looking up like, 'what happened?' But it is kind of cool. It brings out that history." MORE: See all throwback schemes