Where there's a will
By A.J. Foyt
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The crew begins to work on the back-up car after
Greg Ray was hit by Billy Boat in morning practice. |
Where there's a will, there's a way.
That's something I truly believe in and it's probably one of the
reasons behind my success in racing.
The final race of the Indy Racing League, postponed from September
16th because of the September 11th attack on New York and Washington,
was rescheduled for Saturday, October 6th. It started out with rain at
Texas Motor Speedway on Friday and practice was pretty much washed
out.
That was particularly bad news for my Harrah's team because we were
trying the Infiniti engine for the first time in the Harrah's No. 11
car. Greg Ray was going to drive it. Eliseo Salazar was in the
Harrah's No. 14 car, which had the Oldsmobile engine. I was trying to
figure out which way I wanted to go next year as far as powerplants.
The IRL lengthened what was to be the final practice on race morning
from a half hour to two hours. Things were going pretty well in that
final practice until Billy Boat lost control and spun, shot across the
track and torpedoed Ray.
The car came back on the hook. After looking at it, my team manager
figured we were done. That car wasn't going to be fixed.
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Switching out the wiring harness and
computers on the car was just one of many challenges faced in
replacing the Oldsmobile engine with the Infiniti engine. |
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I had other ideas. I started asking questions about Eliseo's back-up
car. The last time it competed was at Indianapolis with Robby Gordon
driving. The big problem was that it had an Oldsmobile engine. I heard
a lot of reasons from my crew why we couldn't switch them.
I wanted to try. But if we kept talking about why we couldn't do it,
we wouldn't do it. I told my crew to cut the talk and get the back-up
car out. Find out what we need to make it work and start working. I
was hard on them.
We had to modify the bell-housing, make a special oil line, change the
studs on the car itself so the Infiniti would fit in it, change the
headers, put a new undertray and left sidepod on the body (we'd used
one earlier in the season to
fix a car). We had to change the
computers in the car and the wiring harness, which is a tough job,
plus we had to take the throttle cable from the wrecked car and modify
it and change the pedals so the car would fit Greg Ray.
It was a lot of work. I joked that it took us three weeks to do it at
home and we were going to do it in less than four hours at the track.
And you know what? We did. In fact Donnie Beechler, who had driven for
me up to that race, pitched in to help too. My guys worked really hard
and we rolled the car out to the grid with 20 minutes to spare. I was
really proud of them when it started up. I thought we could do it but
even I didn't know for sure.
The race itself was one of the best of the season. You could have
thrown a blanket over the top three for the last 20 laps. Salazar
drove one of his best races of the year. He challenged for the lead
but towards the end he lost the draft and didn't have enough power to
catch back up. He finished fourth. He ended up fifth in the final
point standings.
Sam Hornish got a great run off the final corner of the final lap to
pass Scott Sharp for the win. Hornish went right up the middle between
Sharp and third place Robbie Buhl. It was incredible. The crowd went
nuts.
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The #11 car didn't look as pretty as usual
but it made the race. |
And Ray came from last to finish eighth. Ray was able to turn some
laps in the 217 mph range but without any practice time to dial in the
car, we were a little off the pace. And he hadn't run a race since
mid-August so it was a tough situation. But to get a top-10 finish
after all we went through just to get in the race, well I felt pretty
good about that. And I felt really good about my guys.
They did a helluva job.
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