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Horsepower and Handling Still Rule at Michigan By A.J. Foyt
 When
I raced Indy cars at Michigan International Speedway it was always a horsepower
track. But it's also a track where handling and being able to work the draft is
very important. Sunday's races at MIS proved those things still hold true.
All of my drivers had raced there before but in different types of cars, all
except my grandson A.J. Foyt IV. He had only seen it on TV.
Michigan rewards the young and the brave. My 18-year-old grandson won the
Infiniti Pro Series race in the Harrah's No. 14, and 21-year-old Tomas Scheckter
won his first Indy car race for Eddie Cheever's Red Bull team. Both races were
packed with high-speed, wheel-to-wheel action.
In A.J. IV's race, the action was cut short due to rain. He had been having a
tough battle with Arie Luyendyk, Jr., Ed Carpenter and Aaron Fike. Starting
second, A.J. took the lead on the sixth lap and then swapped it back and forth
with Luyendyk Jr. In fact each driver led 15 laps of the 30-lap race. The draft
gave the guy running second a slight advantage in speed. At times, A.J. would
drift as far back as fourth, then he'd hook up with a car and make his way back
to the front.
I know he learned quite a bit the way drafting works. I also know he was having
fun because when they called the race complete at 30 laps, his spotter and crew
chief Jack Starne told him to follow the pace car down pit lane across the
finish line. Jack congratulated him on winning the race and A.J. radioed back,
"The race is over?"
We celebrated for a little bit in Victory Circle but then A.J. IV had to get
back and change into his Harrah's crew uniform to work the Indy car race.
Once again we were running three Harrah's cars. After last weekend at Nashville,
some people in the garage area were surprised we came out with three cars in
Michigan but my guys worked hard getting everything back together.
For the second week in a row, it was the "old man" Eliseo Salazar who was
showing the younger drivers the fastest way around the track. Salazar qualified
9th in the Harrah's/Banco Chile 11 Dallara, while Airton Dare was 13th in the
Harrah's 14 Dallara and Greg Ray started 23rd in the Harrah's/EDS 41.
Unfortunately, the crew made a mistake on bolting up Salazar's car after warming
up the engine and they forgot to bolt down the air cleaner. When the green flag
dropped he went to the back in a hurry. They finally figured out the problem and
corrected it but they could never get it sealed as tight as it needed to be. He
lost some laps and ended up 19th.
Dare did go to the front in the Harrah's 14 and was in the top five by lap 60.
But after his pitstop on lap 78, the engine just seemed to lose power and got
worse with each lap. He pitted and I told my crew to look at the engine and
throttle linkage, but they weren't moving fast enough so I jumped over the wall,
punched the air cleaner off and looked myself. The officials yelled at me but at
that point I was so angry I didn't care. He went back out after a couple
adjustments but it didn't matter. Airton finally ended up parking it for good
after 127 laps. We still haven't figured out what went wrong with the engine but
we will have it sorted out by Kentucky. He's still sixth in points at least.
Greg didn't seem to have power from the start. He got out of the draft and when
that happens, you can go down a lap in a hurry on a high-speed track like
Michigan. Once he got in the draft with some guys, he could keep up with them,
but by that time he had lost a couple laps. Still he finished the race which is
the first race he's finished since he started driving for me. He placed 17th.
It was not a great weekend but at least we came out of Michigan with one victory
and all of our Harrah's Indy cars intact, which felt pretty good after my
weekend at Nashville.
As for the race itself, the crowd saw some great racing among the youngsters!
And if we had given our "most experienced" driver a decent shot, he would have
given the youngsters a run for the money. |
