Season Finale
By A.J. Foyt



The 2007 IndyCar season is over and I would like to thank all of the tracks, organizations and individuals who made it such a memorable one for me by recognizing my 50th anniversary in Indy car racing. I’d especially like to thank my sponsor ABC Supply Co. which put together a lot of nice tributes over the year in recognition of my 50th and their 25th anniversary in business.


Looking back over the past five decades, it’s hard for me to believe all that has happened in my career, not to mention my life. I have to say that when I weigh it all out, the good offsets the bad and if I had to do it all over again, I don’t know what I would change. Okay, I’d take a pass on some of my racing accidents like Riverside, CA in ’65 and Elkhart Lake, WI in ’90 and maybe a couple of rides on my bulldozer, but all in all, I’ve enjoyed a great life. And just for the record, I plan to continue on enjoying it.


The final race of our IndyCar season should have had a better ending, and for a while it appeared that it would. Darren Manning qualified eighth in the ABC Supply Dallara/Honda which was his best effort on an oval this year.


We concentrated on finding speed in the No. 14 for qualifying because we felt that we had a solid race set-up for the mile-and-a-half ovals. And we’d been hurting on our oval track qualifying runs lately.


Over the past season we’ve learned what Darren likes in a race car, but unfortunately on Sunday, we learned what he didn’t like. And we found out pretty fast. At the start of the race, he charged into seventh but then he started dropping back. When the yellow came out for Marco Andretti’s accident on lap 35, we pitted and made some wing changes to the car.


When the green flag racing resumed, Darren felt the car wasn’t any better so I called him in after seven laps and made a bigger change. It took about four laps under green to do it, and he didn’t like the car at all after that. There was some thought of trying to work it out during the race but with a championship on the line, I didn’t want to be doing a test session out there.


Ten laps later, I told him to park it. He came in right away.


We’d made a lot of gains with Darren but he wasn’t comfortable in the car and the longer he stayed out there, the riskier things became. In one sense it was tough because it meant finishing 21st, our worst placing of the season. With this being the last race of the season, that finish will be our motivation to work harder than ever in the off season.


Before I sign off, I’d like to congratulate Dario Franchitti and the Andretti-Green Team on winning the IndyCar Series championship. And I want to send a personal congratulations to John Anderson, the team manager who has spear-headed the AGR team’s last two Indy 500 wins and championships with two different drivers! John’s been a friend for 20 years and worked with our team back in the early 90’s. He’s a great team manager who knows how to get the best out of his people.


I’m really looking forward to next year when we can capitalize on all the work Darren and our ABC Supply team has done this past season. There were frustrating times but there were a lot of good times too. We knew this would be a building year and it has been. Now I understand his English (most of it) and he understands my Texan, so I believe we can come out swinging in 2008.


As someone once wrote, “It ain’t over till the fat man swings!”