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Lady Luck Was Busy at Texas
By A.J. Foyt
 In
every race, there is a certain element of luck, both good and bad. I
don't think Lady Luck played into Tony Kanaan's victory at Texas Motor
Speedway because he dominated the race but she was pretty busy with a
lot of other drivers who were real lucky. Some of the moves out there
were wild, even for a Saturday night race at Texas.
Unfortunately, she had her back turned on A.J. Foyt IV on lap 38 when
he became a victim of another driver's error. My grandson was simply
at the wrong place at the wrong time.
The shame of it is A.J. IV was running a good, conservative race on a
night that was pretty crazy. Veterans were banging wheels as if they
were in bumper cars, not 210 mph open wheel Indy cars. Disasters were
avoided nearly every lap and I still don't know how except that Lady
Luck was riding with them.
In A.J. IV's case, he started 17th out of 22 cars. He dropped back a
little in the opening laps but then he started heading to the front.
The Conseco Dallara was handling great, and despite the horsepower
disadvantage in the current Toyota engine (they're working hard to
correct it), he stayed with the lead pack. He could run high or low,
wherever he wanted.
And that's when his own personal disaster struck and Lady Luck was
nowhere in sight.
A.J. IV was running the high line outside of Ed Carpenter as they
drove down the backstretch. Heading into turn three, Carpenter closed
too quickly on his teammate Alex Barron. Hitting the brakes, Carpenter
realized that he was going to hit Barron in the rear, so he swerved to
the outside to miss Barron and clipped A.J. IV's left front instead.
Meanwhile A.J. IV saw that the two teammates were in trouble so he
backed off the gas and started taking evasive action by turning right.
He almost avoided disaster. But Carpenter nicked him enough to send
A.J. IV straight to the wall.
Luckily for him, Texas Motor Speedway had recently installed the Safer
Barrier "soft wall" system which absorbs a lot of the energy of a high
speed impact. He hit hard. A.J. IV's car hugged the wall after the
initial impact and kept hitting it as he slid from turn three all the
way to the start-finish line. I'm just glad that he was able to walk
away. So maybe Lady Luck hadn't totally abandoned him in the deal
after all.
I asked him over the radio if he was okay. He said that he was but I
could hear the disappointment in his voice. I felt really bad for him.
It's one thing to have an accident like that when your car isn't
handling and you're having a bad race. Then you think, I'm glad it's
over. But when your car is handling good and you're just biding your
time and someone else's mistake becomes your accident, well that can
really take the wind out of your sails.
Ed came over afterwards and apologized to A.J. IV which was nice but
it didn't make it much easier to take.
I told him again that he drove a good race. He just has to know that
his time to shine will come, with or without Lady Luck.
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