Saturday Night Racing in Richmond

By A.J. Foyt 

Short track racing on Saturday nights is the backbone of American auto racing. It is how I started out racing and how most of today's stars got their start. And I always remember it as being fun, exciting and full of close calls that often turned out to be too close.

I knew when the Indy Racing League put Richmond International Raceway, a 3/4-mile D-shaped oval, on the schedule that the fans were in for an exciting show. And the fans proved they were ready for it because the track had to open additional grandstands to take care of the last minute walk-up crowd. 

Excitement doesn't come cheap so I knew that it was going to be costly to some teams. For my Harrah's team, it cost us a chance at victory and our second place standing in the points.

I admit, Eliseo Salazar didn't have the strongest car at the beginning of the 250-lap race but he was running in the top five in the No. 14 Harrah's Dallara. We continued to make adjustments and the car got better as the night went on. 

We decided to go with the ‘conserve fuel' strategy (less pitstops) and it worked. Buddy Lazier and Eddie Cheever pitted (after second place Airton Dare crashed lapping his good friend Felipe Giaffone) with about 60 laps to go. We elected to stay out and took over the lead. Our tires weren't as fresh but the Firestone tires really don't give up that much and we had a lighter fuel load than the others. When the race restarted, Salazar ran his fastest laps of the night.

I think some people were surprised to see Salazar pull away from Cheever and Lazier, who by the way, drove a great race and ended up winning. The one who was most surprised I bet was Cheever. He knew it'd be tough to pass Salazar on the track because it was a one-groove track for the leaders. Lazier had led every lap until Salazar took over during Lazier's pitstop.

And with all the preaching we heard from Cheever about how the drivers shouldn't be so aggressive because they could kill somebody, I figured he'd take his own advice to heart. In fact, he didn't. What he did was pull the same move that he was so critical of several weeks before at the Texas race, shoving his car's nose in where it had nowhere to go but into the other guy's car.

Salazar held onto the lead after a second restart. Cheever said he got a run on Salazar off of turn two, but actually Cheever ducked low and tried to outdrag Salazar down the backstretch. Cheever kept his foot in the throttle way past the mark where everyone was lifting for turn three. I guarantee you, even if Salazar had stayed as high as Cheever wished, Cheever still would have hit Salazar because Cheever never would have made the turn. He came in too hard and too low. Instead of hitting Salazar in the rear wheel as he did, he would have hit him in the front wheel and maybe even launched him. 

Need further proof? Just listen to Cheever's interview afterwards. Remember the accident at Texas where he was an innocent victim while running in the top three? He was quite angry in his comments afterwards. This time he seemed awful calm when he was talking to pit reporter Jack Arute. He knew he was wrong and he knew he blew it big time. Salazar was still in the care center so he didn't get a chance to give his side of the story. They took him to the hospital for x-rays and a CT scan, which turned out negative. 

I was still on the radio with Donnie Beechler who had a tough weekend in the No. 11 Harrah's car. He crashed in practice on Thursday and he never did get comfortable in the car. He ended up seventh mainly because he stayed out of trouble. He's going to race in Kansas for me and I think we'll have a much better showing there. 

Salazar finished 12th and dropped to fourth in the standings. 

I made it a point to see Cheever after the race. I told him he's a nice guy out of the car, maybe one of the nicest, but inside a racecar he goes brain-dead. I don't know how else to explain the way he races sometimes. Maybe when he watches the videotape, he'll understand what I'm talking about. But I doubt it. 

The IRL announced next year's schedule, which is almost the same as this year's except we don't go back to Atlanta. We will go to two tracks I raced on in the past: Michigan Speedway and Nazareth Speedway. It's a 14-race schedule, which is the biggest yet in the IRL's existence.

This week we head to a brand new facility, Kansas Speedway in Kansas City. The IRL made some history in historic Richmond but tracks like Kansas Speedway are about its future. Seems to me, it is looking bright.