Cool Head Yields Top Five Finish
By A.J. Foyt

Iowa Speedway looks like a fun track to drive but as the Iowa Corn Indy 250 proved, looks can be deceiving.  I think there were more than a few drivers who didn’t have much fun Sunday afternoon, or if they did, it was short-lived.

I was glad Darren Manning and our No. 14 ABC Supply car got out of there in one piece because it was a wild race. The top-five finish was a bonus. I also want to say that Iowa Speedway is a beautiful facility—they did a heckuva job building that track. It’s been a while since I’ve been to Iowa but I really enjoyed my visit there.

Some people might say we lucked in to our top five-finish but I say that avoiding all of those crashes that happened right in front of Darren took more than luck. Luck might account for one or two but he missed all of them so I think you have to give him credit because there was some skill involved too.

His experience and not pushing the ABC Supply car to its absolute limit on a day when everyone else had trouble staying within their limits worked to our advantage.

We’ve had other races where we’ve had rotten luck—running strong but having yellows come out after we’ve pitted or having problems with the tires (like at Texas when we cut a tire right away). We had some of that Sunday too – the yellow came out during our first green flag pitstop—and I thought, oh no, not again. But this time we got our lap back with the wave around. We lost all our track position which gave Darren prime seating for the accidents that followed and I saw just how good he was at choosing the right line.

We had problems with the tires but everyone else did too. They were so hard that our ABC Supply car didn’t start feeling good until about 20 laps into the run. That made Darren cautious on the restarts which probably gave him that extra second or two he needed to decide when all hell broke loose in front of him.

But it hurt us in the end.

For our final pitstop on lap 216, we were going to do fuel only because the tires looked so good. A crewman asked the Firestone engineer about our plan and the Firestone engineer was concerned enough to speak to me personally and recommend changing tires. His concern was strong enough that I ordered the tires as Darren came down pit road!

It wasn’t pretty the few seconds before Darren got to our box but the crew got the tires on and away he went. We came out ahead of Buddy Rice and would have stayed ahead of him had the yellow not come out for debris about 10 laps later.

Darren needed 20 laps for his tires to come in and when the green came out with 15 laps to go, I knew we would be in trouble. Buddy squeezed underneath him five laps from the end. I thought we would end up sixth but then Ed Carpenter had a problem right at the end so we got our top five.

Had it been for the win, I would have risked not changing tires but I’m not going to take a chance like that for a fifth or sixth place finish. Of course I think Darren would have given Scott Sharp a real hard run for third if I had. Others had some bad luck (and some of it was self-induced but that’s another column). I think Darren earned his top five--he kept his head when it seemed to me that everyone else was losing theirs.

I understand why Firestone advised us the way they did. What I didn’t know at the time (we’re talking about a hectic 20-second timeframe) was that one of my crewmen had asked Firestone their opinion. That probably would have affected my decision because at the time I thought Firestone was warning everyone. Whenever you ask the tire guys if you should change tires they are always going to say yes because they are the last ones who want to take any risks. And you can’t blame them.

In any case, it was a morale booster for our team and it gives Darren some confidence going to the three-quarter mile Richmond International Raceway, a track very similar to Iowa. The SunTrust Indy Challenge has the potential to be a wild race too. I’ll be pretty busy this weekend because my USAC Silver Crown team will be competing there also. We finished one-two at the last race I was at (the Homestead-Miami season opener) so maybe we can have a doubleheader win this weekend.

You can see for yourself--tune in to ESPN this Saturday night at 7:30 pm eastern.