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IRL Season Opener
By A.J. Foyt
 The
first race of the Indy Racing League season is always exciting because
you wonder if what you did over the winter paid off. I think in the
case of Team Conseco it did even though the results might not show it.
The official boxscore for the Toyota Indy 300 at Homestead-Miami
Speedway shows that A.J. Foyt IV qualified the No. 14 Conseco Dallara/Toyota/Firestone
car in the 19th position and finished 15th completing only 190 laps.
But that's not the whole story.
Our first day of practice went well at the now high-banked 1.5-mile
track in Homestead, Florida. They changed the track from last year by
adding some banking in the turns and it is much faster. Last year the
pole speed was 203 mph, this year it was 217 mph.
A.J. IV was 15th in the first practice session on Friday and had
jumped to 11th in the afternoon session as we fine-tuned the car. I
have noticed throughout our winter testing and this race weekend, that
his feedback on the car has improved a thousand percent. That makes it
a lot easier to give him what he needs for a car set-up.
Our problems started when we changed our engine for Saturday because
the fresh engine just didn't seem to have the power that the other one
did. We lost three miles an hour overnight! There can be a lot of
reasons for this and at first we thought we had the gearing wrong.
We changed the gearing for qualifying but that didn't help because A.J.
IV qualified last. And he wasn't happy about it.
When the engineers went over the engine, it seemed to check out fine
but in final practice it still seemed to lack oomph. We tried to
compensate with the gearing but looking back I just should have put a
new engine in. The penalty for doing an engine change after qualifying
is that you start last because there's a new rule to eliminate special
qualifier engines. In our case that didn't matter.
I guess I wanted to believe that we could fix it with gearing. If this
happens again, I am going with my gut instinct and we will change the
motor. We can always figure out what is wrong with it later.
The race went as good as can be expected when you're down on power.
A.J. Iv would run with them through the turns and just watch them walk
away down the straights. He tried to hold onto the draft and did
pretty good but he still has some learning to do in that area. He
changed his line because he could run high or low but it didn't change
his speed.
He was running as high as 11th before our last pit stop. He came out
14th but that was because some guys were out of sequence. He was
running 13th when the car lost power with just 10 laps to go. Coasting
to the third turn, he turned off onto the road course and stopped. He
was done for the day.
Once we got the car back to the garage, we tried to figure out what
went wrong. In the short time that we had before loading up, we were
able to eliminate some possibilities. We won't know the reason for the
problems until Toyota Racing Development goes over the engine back in
their shop. I am confident that they will figure out the problem and
the solution.
Overall, A.J. IV has improved so much from last year that once we give
him the whole package, he's going to run with it. And win with it.
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