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Kansas
By A.J. Foyt
 Once
again the Indy car fans at Kansas Speedway were treated to some great
open wheel racing capped by a close finish. How close?
Twelve-thousandths of a second (you can't even blink that fast)
between winner Tony Kanaan and runner-up Dan Wheldon.
The results don't show it but A.J. Foyt IV drove one of his best races
ever. He started 21st and finished 16th Sunday afternoon in the Argent
Mortgage 300 at the 1.5 mile superspeedway in Kansas City, Kansas.
Attrition was low and there were only 19 caution laps in the 200
lapper so most of the race was run at speeds in the 208-211 mph range.
As A.J. IV said afterwards, "I drove my butt off to finish 16th!"
He shouldn't be too disappointed because even though he finished
further back then he did at Richmond the week before, he turned in a
better performance. So did my ABC Supply crew. Their pit stops were
all solid.
The weekend didn't start out that good because we were last on the
speed charts on Saturday. I decided to abandon the baseline set-up
we'd been running since Indy (searching for more speed), and went back
to a more predictable set-up for the final practice on race morning.
We picked up our speed and felt better about our chances in the race.
A.J. IV liked the way the ABC Supply car handled in traffic and he was
able to feel the changes that we made.
We were still down on horsepower but at least we had a car that could
hang in with the draft.
A couple times in the race we pitted at the end of some caution
periods to get a little more fuel in the tank and extend our pit
window opportunity (giving us more of a choice of when to stop for
fuel). At one point we gave up some track position (and sacrificed
running in the top 10 during the middle part of the race) but overall
I think our fuel strategy worked. At the end of the race, we did have
to duck into the pits for a splash of fuel (3.6 seconds or less than 8
gallons) but everyone was in the same position.
For much of the race, A.J. IV ran hard with Patrick Carpentier (he
finished 14th). The first non-factory supported Toyota was 13th place
finisher Alex Barron, Carpentier's teammate. It's just tough to
compete against the factory-supported teams.
Kansas is a horsepower track. The Penske and Ganassi teams' Toyotas
looked like they could hold their own in the early and middle stages
of the race but at the end, the highest finishing Toyota driver was
Ganassi's Darren Manning in seventh place. The Honda drivers took the
first four spots with Tomas Scheckter in a Chevrolet claiming fifth.
Danica Patrick won her first pole position but something happened to
hers and outside pole winner Buddy Rice's cars because they weren't
real factors for the win for most of the race. They finished ninth and
tenth. However their teammate Vitor Meira squeezed in for third place
just two hundredths of a second out of first.
We have this weekend off but then we head to Nashville Superspeedway
for our last Saturday night race of the season. I hate to say this but
there are usually a lot of accidents because the concrete surface is
hard on the tires (one year all three of my cars crashed). They lose
grip and drivers don't like that feeling. For me, whenever we roll it
back on the Foyt Racing transporter after Nashville, I feel like we
won the battle even if we didn't win the war.
Tune in to the Firestone Indy 200 on Saturday night, July 16th. The
race will be televised live on ESPN starting at 7 p.m. eastern. |
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