Infineon
By A.J. Foyt


Most racers are optimists. You have to be or you’d go crazy. So we always look for that silver lining in the black cloud. This past weekend at Infineon Raceway was a good example of that.


We tested the ABC Supply Dallara/Honda with Ryan Hunter-Reay at the track about 10 days before the race along with a bunch of other teams and left our ABC Supply transporter and race cars out there. We haven’t run good at Infineon so I really wanted to test there and I’m glad we did. We found out things that didn’t work and came away with some thoughts on how to make the car better for the race weekend.


You wouldn’t have known it by how we ran on Saturday though when Ryan qualified 16th for the Indy Grand Prix of Sonoma in the No. 14. Although the fundamental changes that we made to the car did what they were supposed to, we were still missing something. It turned out that our calculations were wrong. I figured it out Saturday evening—after qualifying. We made the adjustments.


On Sunday, when Ryan went out in the race morning warm-up, he said it was a whole new race track for him, which meant the car was driving the way it should. He was fifth quick until the last third of the session when others began putting on new tires but he liked the car even on old tires, so we were happy.


We were even happier when Firestone executives presented Ryan a check for $10,000 during the driver introductions. The fans voted for him to receive the Firestone Tire-ific Award at indycar.com for his performance at Mid-Ohio. Thank you Race Fans!

When there was that big crash on lap one in front of us, I wasn’t sure that Ryan had gotten through it. He did but not without smacking Robert Doornbos in the rear. It damaged the right front wing a little bit but he was able to stay out there. He did a heckuva job going right and left through the mess of cars. By lap two we were in eighth position!


It looked like we were going to have a good day after all.


And we were having a good day even though he couldn’t get by Doornbos, despite being faster. Infineon is a really tight track. He finally did pass – in the pits. The ABC Supply team gave him a good quick stop. But Oriol Servia pitted a lap later and beat us out of the pits—barely. Ryan, on hot tires, thought he could out-brake Servia going into the hairpin because Servia was on cold tires.


Well, it didn’t work. Servia cut down on Ryan who, to be honest, wasn’t up far enough on Servia. He paid the penalty because Servia clipped Ryan’s left front wing. Ryan radioed in that he was coming in. We scrambled for the front nose assembly that we keep behind our pit for times like these. We’ve changed our share of noses this year!


We had a problem getting this one off because we should have been able to do it in less than 15 seconds and it took 25. He came out just ahead of the leaders.


In fact, he was able to stay ahead of them, and even increase his lead despite being on the harder compound black primary tires. We had another good pit stop on lap 52 because we still came out ahead of the leaders. The difference was that for the final stint, Ryan was on the softer (and faster) red-rimmed alternate tires…maybe the only advantage to not making it into the top 12, because you have an extra set of the reds for the race. See? Silver lining!


Anyway, his speed showed! He pulled out a lead of 12 seconds on Dario Franchitti and Ryan Briscoe who finished one-two. I know David Luck, the CEO of ABC Supply, noticed it because he was watching from our pits. I’m sure the 450 ABC Supply guests who came to the race also saw how Ryan pulled away.


The only problem was that he was behind the leaders on the scoring chart. Well not the only problem.


With 10 laps to go, Ryan had closed in seven seconds on the group of cars ahead of him and was setting them up because they were for position.


Next thing I know, I see the ABC Supply car come to a stop on TV. He didn’t hit anything, the car just died. They towed it to a corner and left it there. We were done.


I knew there was nothing more to do so I told my troops to beat feet because we were leaving now. I didn’t want to make a bad day worse by being stuck in traffic because it looked like the track had a pretty good turnout. I told my guys if they were going with me on my plane, they’d better be on the way to their cars…now. We had a four-hour flight ahead of us.


So I didn’t actually see Ryan afterwards but I did talk to him on the phone. When they got the car back to the garage, it fired up so they felt it was the alternator or wiring that caused it to quit.


I do know I was upset when it happened but if it had happened when he was running fifth, I would have been really mad!


We did have a fast race car and pulling away from the leaders showed just how fast it was. And if it had to quit, at least we were running 17th and we didn’t lose a top-five finish.


So there you are, there’s that silver lining--again.