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Kansas
By A.J. Foyt
 We
came into Kansas Speedway with some high hopes because that was where
we pulled off our doubleheader win on the same day last year. My
grandson A.J. Foyt IV won his first Infiniti Pro Series race and
Airton Dare had won his first Indy car race.
We left Kansas this year thinking of what might have been.
We came close to repeating as winners in the Pro Series race. Ed
Carpenter won the pole in the No.14 Futaba Dallara car. He led the
most laps in the race but finished second to series point leader Mark
Taylor. It was exciting with lots of wheel to wheel action in the
final 20 laps. Ed drove a good race and put on a great show for the
fans. He moved from fourth to second in the standings.
In the Indy car series, A.J. IV was in the No.14 Conseco
G-Force/Toyota and Jaques Lazier was in the No. 5 Dallara/Toyota.
Working with two different chassis can be challenging but I felt like
the G-Force chassis would be a better car for A.J. IV at the
superspeedways.
We worked on race set-ups instead of qualifying set-ups and it showed
in qualifying because Jaques and A.J. started in the eighth row. At
the start of the race, Jaques took off and was running pretty well
until a car he was trying to pass clipped his front wing. He had to
pit to replace it and he went down two laps to the leaders early in
the race.
A.J. IV meanwhile was passing cars but one car he passed on the inside
came down on him going down the backstretch and the two banged wheels.
He was mad and I told him to calm down and tell me how it affected the
car. He thought it didn't hurt it just knocked out the wheel
alignment.
He was lucky. When he was able to pit during a caution for a track
inspection, we discovered that his right rear tire had a big slash on
the sidewall. That tire wasn't going to last much longer.
He returned to the race and was again passing cars. He'd gotten into
12th position when the race slowed for the wreck involving rookie Dan
Wheldon and Felipe Giaffone. Wheldon walked away but Giaffone suffered
a fractured pelvis and right femur. He is out for the season.
During that caution A.J. IV had moved into 9th position and we talked
about whether or not he should pit. I told him to come in even though
the leaders didn't. I thought we could gain if we had a different fuel
strategy but as it turned out, we lost.
He went back out in 14th position and two laps into the green flag
running, Buddy Lazier got real loose, like sideways loose, right in
front of A.J. IV who was trying to lap him (Buddy was having a tough
day). A.J. IV tapped him and straightened him out but it bent and tore
the right front wing of the Conseco car.
He pitted and we tried to straighten out the wing but we could see
we'd have to replace it. Unfortunately we didn't have a spare. Mo Nunn
lent us a spare wing from his car, pretty nice of him since it was his
driver who'd gotten hurt earlier.
A.J. IV returned to the race and said his car was real darty. He asked
if he should pit again and we told him to hang on until he got a
yellow-if he could. We didn't have the wing/nose assembly yet anyway.
When we got it, we asked him how the car was and he said that the car
was still darty in the turns but he could deal with it. He didn't want
Team Conseco to have to change the nose assembly under green. He was
about a second off the pace.
We never did get a yellow and we finally told him to pit because he
was getting low on fuel anyway. We lost some laps putting the new
nose/wing piece on and I could see the frustration in A.J. IV's eyes.
This race had gone south in a hurry. To make things worse, he couldn't
hear us real well after that-one of the car radio's wires must have
gotten jostled in the switch. Still he hung in there and we still
would have had a good finish but the engine blew with about 25 laps to
go. He finished 15th. I know we would have gotten a top-10 finish if
he hadn't had those problems in the middle of the race.
Jaques was able to avoid trouble the rest of his race and he finished
10th. He was frustrated because he felt his car was good enough to win
the race.
With all of the problems, I felt good that we could roll both cars
back onto their trailers. Neither one had the right color nose though.
The new nose for A.J. IV's car was painted blue and red in the
Hollywood colors while Jaques' blue and sliver car used the nose from
A.J. IV's green and white Conseco Dallara. Confused yet? It wasn't
pretty but it worked.
This past weekend I lost a good friend of mine. Clarence Cagle who
would have been 89 at the end of the month, passed away on July 5th.
He'd been pretty ill this year and didn't make it back to the 500.
Clarence was the track superintendent at Indianapolis Motor Speedway
for over 30 years. After he retired in 1977, he was still a consultant
and I would always see him at Indy in May. In fact, he was a
consultant on many of the new speedways that were recently built
including Kansas Speedway, where we were racing when he died. I will
miss him. |
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