Richmond
By A.J. Foyt


Before you can win, you have to finish and our ABC Supply team took a step towards doing just that Saturday night in the SunTrust Indy Challenge at Richmond International Raceway.


We finished the race.


Finishing 15th isn’t much to celebrate unless it’s the first time your car finished a race without needing some repairs because of accidents from other drivers’ mistakes! It’s been a tough year for our team, our drivers and our sponsors.


We didn’t practice that well and we didn’t qualify well—we lined up in 18th. But in the final practice we were eighth quickest so I think we had a pretty good car for the race. We’re still working on our communication because we don’t always understand what the other one is saying and this was our first race where we worked together during an actual race.


It became pretty clear quickly that passing was going to be more of a challenge than usual at Richmond which has always had close wheel-to-wheel racing. This was bad news for our team because we were starting so far back. Track position was everything.


After the first few laps, Ryan radioed in that the car was pushing too much so we added more front wing to the car on the first stop along with an air pressure adjustment which made it better. By the middle of the race he also changed up his gear shifting—going from using three gears to just two-- which I’d said would make the car handle smoother, and it did.


Even though Ryan could run with the leaders, he couldn’t pass the leaders and they couldn’t pass anyone either. The race was a parade for almost all of its 300 laps which made it pretty dull by IndyCar standards. There were a couple of crashes--usually when the cars got out of the groove, they were in the wall. Ryan did a good job of keeping the ABC Supply car in the groove because it is so easy to crash there.


Hopefully it’s is a sign of a new direction for our ABC Supply team and we can start building some momentum going into the road courses. They’re not my favorite type of racing but our new driver is anxious to get back to them so I think we can expect some better finishes.


His best finish in his short IndyCar career came at our next track – Watkins Glen International, a 3.4-mile road course in New York State. It was also where we had our best finish in the last five or six years. In fact we were headed to our first win since 2002 but Ryan got the jump on our driver Darren Manning with less than 10 laps to go. Darren finished second that day because Ryan won the race. So we head to the Glen with some good (and not quite as good) memories from last year.


The race will be broadcast live Sunday, July 5th on ABC-TV starting at 1pm.