Chicagoland
By A.J. Foyt


In our final points race of the season at Chicagoland Speedway Sunday afternoon, the IndyCar Series put on the best show of the year. It was an all-out, wheel-to-wheel battle from start to finish. Helio Castroneves came from last to nose out Scott Dixon for the win in a photo finish but Dixon won the championship. It was an exciting day for both teams and I'd like to add my Congratulations to the many that they have received.


It was great for our ABC Supply team to end this “points season” on a high note. Darren Manning finished seventh--his best finish at Chicagoland. He had to come from 23rd to do it too.


Qualifying was especially disappointing after having started eighth here last year. When the engineers analyzed the data, there were several little things that went wrong during that run. But we knew Darren had a good race car from the practice earlier in the day when he had the No. 14 car mixing it up with the Ganassi and Penske cars in race trim.


In the race, Darren seemed to be a little slow in the beginning but he was in the hands of my son Larry and our engineer Mike Colliver; I wanted to work with the rookie Franck Perera who I hired to drive the No. 41 ABC Supply car.


Since I was working with the new kid, I didn’t know what Darren was saying about the No. 14. Whatever the problems were, they got them figured out. In the last 50 laps, he hooked up with my grandson Anthony (A.J. Foyt IV), and they made their way into the top 10. A caution came out on lap 182, and everyone pitted for a splash of fuel when the pits opened on lap 185. Darren came out in ninth, moved into seventh, dropped back to eighth and then came across the line in seventh—with a little help from Anthony.


Anthony had been running in the top five most of the race—he had a heckuva race going after starting 15th. I learned afterwards that a jam-up on pit lane cost him about 7 spots on his lap 140 pit stop--which is how he ended up racing with Darren, who’d decided to cool it until the last 50 laps. Anthony almost made it back up there – a splash and go on the final stop got him to sixth. When he tried to take fifth on the final lap, he lost it coming out of four and went sailing by on the infield grass—backwards! He didn’t hit anything but he didn’t cross the finish line either—he placed 13th.


For Darren, it was his seventh top-10 finish of the season. He finished 14th in the standings. We missed out on 13th by one point to Vitor Meira. The biggest difference this year is that there were 26 cars at every race instead of 18. There was more competition and it was stronger too. We are going to continue to work hard over the winter to improve our program.


We ran a second ABC Supply car this weekend to test rookie Franck Perera, because I’m thinking about fielding a second car if we can get the sponsorship. You could say it was his first IndyCar oval race-- he did race at Miami in March, but that was so long ago that he had to re-learn everything.


The two ABC Supply cars started side by side. Perera was satisfied with his qualifying run since it was all new to him and he was sitting right next to his teammate. But when the green flag dropped, so did Perera…to last. It’s been a while since I worked with a rookie so I forgot about how steep the learning curve is.


I was a little concerned in the beginning but as the race went on, he gained more confidence. He was racing against drivers who had the benefit of nine more oval races under their belt. He had stayed on the lead lap (until we ran him out of fuel with two to go) and he did a good job on pit stops--even when our crew didn’t. On one stop an air gun failed, but our biggest problem was the fuel—slow to plug in and on the last stop, they didn’t get enough in and Franck ran out of fuel with two laps to go. That was inexcusable. He should have finished 12th on the lead lap but instead he coasted into the pits two laps down and was credited with 15th.


We still have one race left but it will be a non-points race that takes place in Surfers Paradise, Australia at the end of October. Because of the time change (they are half a day ahead of us), it will be broadcast Saturday night, Oct 25 at 10:30 pm on ESPN Classic.


I plan to watch that one on TV as that trip to Australia is way too long for me. My son Larry has had a few test runs at the helm of the No. 14 this season and his record is pretty good—three top-10 finishes in four races! I’m going to let him handle this last race in 2008.


He’s looking forward to it…and so am I.