It's all about timing
By Larry Foyt


In many ways, success in racing is dependent on a lot of factors and one of those is timing. We have a saying down here, "It's all about timing" and more often than not, it is. Whether it's hooking up with the right team or the right sponsor or making the right moves in a race, timing can be critical.

Hooking up with Harrah's Entertainment, Inc. when we did, was a combination of opportunity and great timing. And it's been paying dividends ever since.

I really enjoy doing the Harrah's events and it's not just because I'm having a pretty good year on the tables. The company as a whole is fun to work with and they come up with great promotions. Harrah's middle name is Entertainment and it is easy to see why. For example, in St. Louis, the Harrah's Casino had a huge display (30' – 40' long) with the Harrah's car and crew members made out of balloons! I was very impressed.

They also have a charitable component to their promotions as evidenced by their Meals on Wheels campaign which is bringing national awareness of the needs of seniors to people across the country.

We had a "Meals on Wheels" event on Wednesday and once again I surprised the heck out of some senior citizens when I delivered their meals in my Harrah's Chevrolet race car! We always do a press conference in conjunction with delivery which garners additional publicity for Meals on Wheels.

The next evening, Harrah's held a Fan Fest autograph session at the Casino with myself and several of my fellow Busch competitors. Both events went over very well.

Friday we got down to the business of racing at Gateway International Raceway, a 1.25 mile track located just outside of St. Louis. The Harrah's Chevrolet was pretty good but we were missing the handle on the set-up a little bit. We qualified 19th but we struggled in Happy Hour to find a comfortable set-up that encouraged aggressive driving.

I wasn't thrilled with our qualifying result, after all it wasn't a top-10, but it looked pretty good when I found out that I was actually going to have to start in the rear of the pack! My crew chief Jon Wolfe and I were operating off an older weekend schedule and we were five minutes late for the mandatory Driver's Meeting.

That is a big no-no in NASCAR. It doesn't really matter to NASCAR why you missed it, they send you to the rear of the field.

I was upset for two reasons. The first reason being that it was a miscommunication that happened internally (and will not happen again!) which is embarrassing for our race team and indirectly for our sponsors. We work hard to conduct ourselves in a manner that makes our sponsors proud of us on track and off.

I was upset too for the obvious reason of having to come through a lot more traffic just to get where I would have started had our schedules been correct.

As it turned out the car was working pretty well and I got up to 20th fairly quickly. It was time for the first round of pitstops and ours went off well. As luck would have it (and I didn't seem to be having any this weekend), the yellow came out several laps later and I lost two laps just like that. Those cars that hadn't pitted were able to pit under the yellow and maintain their two lap advantage over me. I wasn't the only one who suffered from ill timing but that didn't make me feel much better about it.

As I said earlier, success in racing is about timing and it was becoming apparent to me that my timing was a little off that night. But racing is also about persistence and not giving up when things don't go your way.

My car wasn't perfect but my Harrah's crew made the best of our situation and we kept digging for every advantage.

When all was said and done, we finished 23rd. It wasn't great but the fact is, we keep improving over last year's results everywhere we go which means we're learning from our mistakes.

I hope we keep that trend going because we head to Pikes Peak this week where we qualified 10th last year. If we improve in our qualifying there like we did at Gateway (qualified 29th last year, 19th this year), we'll be on pole in Colorado!

And you can bet that Jon and I will be to the Driver's Meeting at least five minutes early.

It's all about timing!