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A.J.'s Race Recaps: |
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Season Preview
 By A.J. Foyt
I am in Brazil for our IZOD IndyCar Series opener and I’m anxious to get the season started. We have Vitor Meira back in the No. 14 ABC Supply Indy car after he spent most of 2009 recovering from his bad accident at Indianapolis where he broke his back. He is fully recovered and did well when we tested at Barber Motorsports Park two weeks ago.
For the first time in the history of the IRL, we are opening the racing season outside of the United States. Vitor is excited to be racing in his home country and he assures me I will have a good time.
We have a lot of things to look forward to this season and I believe it will be our best season of the decade. Our team has put in a lot of hours getting the ABC Supply cars ready. They spent the winter overhauling all of the equipment, rebuilding or replacing parts. They’re fitting together the brand new car I bought over the winter but that won’t appear until Indy. I always like to take a new car to Indy. It’s our biggest race of the year and I always want to approach it by giving it our best shot.
Which brings me to the new engineer we hired this year, Jeff Britton, who brings a lot of experience to our team. Jeff worked with Vitor in 2005 when he finished second at Indy so Jeff and Vitor know how to communicate with each other already. That makes a big difference in the chemistry of the team. With our first test I could see that we went faster with every outing so that is a good sign of things to come.
Going to Brazil will be a first for me as the farthest south I’ve been is to Mexico. I’ve heard a lot of different things about Brazil so it will be interesting to find out what’s true and what isn’t. We’re racing in the city of Sao Paulo. I understand the traffic is really bad there which probably explains why they aren’t shutting down certain roads until late Friday night.
It’s only a two day race so that means the drivers will have to practice and qualify on Saturday and race on Sunday. Since they’ve never seen the track—a street course with lots of twists and turns--that will be a little more challenging for them. Being that it is the first race of the season adds to that challenge because everyone is so anxious to get going--the first race is always a bit wild.
I’m sure Vitor is excited to be racing in his home country in front of his family, friends and fans. It puts a little more pressure on all of the Brazilian drivers because they want to do really well but I think Vitor will handle the pressure. He is a very focused race driver so I know he can shut out all of the other distractions that come with racing at your home track.
Everyone on the ABC Supply team is looking forward to having a great season this year. And I am ready to get it started!
Tune in to VERSUS this Sunday at 11:30 a.m. ET or if you don’t get the VERSUS channel, you can watch the race on the internet by going to www.indycar.com. In the meantime, call your cable company or Direct TV and tell them you want VERSUS!
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Season Finale
 By A.J. Foyt
It is none too soon to put the 2009 IndyCar season behind us as far as I’m concerned. I guess everyone was in a hurry to get this season over with because the Homestead-Miami Indy 300 went nonstop! It was green flag racing all the way for the first time in the history of the IndyCar Series.
For the fans at Homestead-Miami Speedway, it was an exciting race because the IndyCar championship was going to the guy who won the race—only eight points separated the top three drivers. Al though Dario Franchitti won the pole, he didn’t stay in the lead very long and it appeared either his teammate Scott Dixon or Ganassi-turned-Penske-driver Ryan Briscoe would win the finale Saturday evening.
Wrong! Franchitti, who almost went a lap down as the other two drivers were battling at speeds over 210mph, took the lead on lap 195 when Briscoe and Dixon had to pit for fuel. I guess those two guys couldn’t believe it went non-stop either because they must have been counting on a caution period to help them with their fuel mileage. When that yellow didn’t come, the tortoise outran the two rabbits to win the race and the title. Congratulations to Dario Franchitti and Chip Ganassi’s team – that was a great way to end the season.
We ended ours with Ryan Hunter-Reay finishing the race without a scratch on the ABC Supply Dallara/Honda. That felt good too. The No. 14 car wasn’t the best it’s been there (started 21st) but we worked on it during the pit stops to get it better so Ryan moved up to finish 13th. The important thing going into the off season is that we finished the race and were able to roll the race car onto the transporter.
That doesn’t sound like much but up to last weekend, we’d run 16 races and crashed in 11 of them, (although the pit road accident at Kentucky didn’t stop us from racing, it just cost us two laps). So that is why I am so happy to get this season over with because it’s been one of the worst for A.J. Foyt Racing. Considering that I’ve had seasons where we’ve crashed three cars in one race, that’s saying something.
Ryan did give our ABC Supply team some bright spots with his seventh place finish in Toronto and his really strong fourth place run in Mid-Ohio. Looking back over 2009, I’m pretty sure that he’s glad this season is over because it’s been a tough year for him too--getting his ride with Vision a week before the season started and then having to switch teams after six races. He adapted pretty good but I know it was hard on him.
And to be truthful, it was hard on us to lose Vitor Meira to injury at Indy because we’d figured out what he liked in a race car. But those Indy 500 accidents—either the pit fire or the crash--could have been so much worse so I’m not going to complain too much.
We have been plagued with bad luck but a lot of it was self-inflicted. I always say you make your own luck so there were times we were in the wrong place at the wrong time but mistakes on our part put us there in the first place. Sometimes the drivers made bad decisions too, so all in all, it made for a bad year. You’re going to have that in racing when you’ve been in it as long as I have.
All you can do is figure out what went wrong where, work to improve in those areas over the winter and come out fighting in 2010. We intend to do just that. I hope you have a good off-season—for us there is no off-season because we’ll be working hard to make 2010 our best season of the decade! |
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