Kentucky
By A.J. Foyt


Well if we’re 13th, it must be Kentucky. At least that’s the way it seems. But there were some major differences for our ABC Supply team this year.


We didn’t finish 13th in the Meijer Indy 300 like we have the last two years at Kentucky Speedway. We probably would have been happier if we had, instead of the 19th place finish we did get. With 267 points, Darren Manning is tied for 13th with Will Power in the IndyCar Series standings after this race (actually Darren is listed as 14th because the tiebreaker is the highest finish and Power won at Long Beach while our highest finish is second). We were 13th after Kentucky last year but the big difference is that there were only 18 full-time cars last year, this year there are 26. As the series had grown this year, so has our competitiveness--and our expectations.


Last year when Darren started 18th, he was dead last and pretty much ran in the back of the pack for most of the race. This year, he started 17th but had nine cars behind him. He spent most of the race running 13th but he was running on the lead lap. After the halfway point, he made some gains and was in tenth place when the car began overheating during a caution period. When the race went green two laps later, he came into the pits because the car had lost power. He was done after 147 laps.


When we got the car back to the garage, we found out that a clamp had broken on the water pipe going into the Honda engine. Those Hondas are strong but they can’t run without water to keep them cool. We know why it happened and we’re going to do some things differently so it can’t happen again.


We were looking at our fifth straight top-10 but that ended with our 19th place finish in this race. Everyone was disappointed about that and the fact that we slipped back to 13th in the points.


Scott Dixon won…again. It was his sixth win of the year—he is having one of those career seasons. Helio Castroneves finished second, nursing it home after almost winning on fuel strategy. Marco Andretti, Vitor Meira and Dan Wheldon rounded out the top five.


This coming weekend is an off weekend for the IndyCar Series but my crew will be making sure that the ABC Supply car is ready for the final three-race swing through Infineon, Detroit and Chicagoland. With the first two of those races being on road/street courses, we believe Darren can make up some of the points he lost at Kentucky this weekend.


Darren flew to Germany because he is racing in the LeMans Series 1000 km event this weekend at Nurburgring. The Ring used to be 14 miles long but was shortened in the early ‘80s to around three miles. Darren’s driving an LMP2 car for Embassy Racing. He did that last year too when he ran at Spa in Belgium. Hope it goes better for him this year.


Our next race is the Peak Antifreeze Indy Grand Prix at Infineon Raceway in Sonoma, CA on August 24th, and it will be televised live on ESPN starting at 5:30 pm ET. I hope you’ll tune in.