Texas
By A.J. Foyt


For me, the race at Texas Motor Speedway is second only to the Indianapolis 500. It’s a beautiful and fast track with exciting racing that usually goes down to the wire under the lights in front of the second biggest crowd on the circuit.


What more could you ask for?


Well, a little luck would help. We lost two fuel pump driveshafts in one weekend with less than 100 laps on the track. I’d heard some other teams have had problems but of course you hear about it only after the fact.


We thought we knew what caused the first failure but in light of the second failure, we will have to look beyond that and dig a little deeper.


With the exception of St. Petersburg this year when the gearbox failed, we really haven’t had any mechanical failures since Darren Manning began running for us in 2007. That’s a credit to our mechanics and to the Honda engines and Dallara chassis. We may not have had the best handling car at every race, but if we didn’t finish, it was because of a brush with the wall or getting caught up in someone else’s mess and to be honest, there hasn’t been too much of that either.


It was particularly frustrating for our team because we want to do well at our home race. Actually, we haven’t had a good race at Texas since we won here in ’98. I thought this year would be different and I think it would have been without the fuel pump problems.


The first problem happened after just six laps in Thursday night’s practice . To replace the fuel pump drive, you have to pull the engine so we were done for the night.


We had the fewest of any laps – 39 -- but still managed to pull out a top-10 practice time on Friday afternoon before the qualifying session. Because of that lack of track time, we missed a little bit on one of the gear ratios and ended up 17th on the grid, but Darren was very happy with the ABC Supply car for the race. With less than 40 minutes of practice on Friday, we had to focus on the race set-up anyway.


In the race he was happy with the car. On the first pit stop (under caution) he asked for a little more front wing because of the car’s slight push. He got a pretty good restart and was dicing it up when I heard him come over the radio saying the car just quit. On the telemetry we saw that it had lost all fuel pressure. After getting towed back to the pitbox and being examined by the ABC Supply crew, the No. 14 was done… after just 19 laps.


Scott Dixon won the race under caution because of a late race accident involving Marco Andretti and Ryan Hunter-Reay. Helio Castroneves and teammate Ryan Briscoe were second and third, pretty remarkable because both were penalized with pit lane violations earlier in the race.


Before closing, I was very sorry to hear about Jim McKay’s passing on race day. I knew Jim from back in the ‘60s and Wide World of Sports--even before ABC began broadcasting the Indy 500. He was one of the nicest, most down-to-earth and sincere sports guys I knew.


He was definitely the first big-time sports announcer that
I ever met. From when he started doing the Indy 500 back in the 60s, he interviewed me many times and he was always a real gentleman--he didn’t ask stupid questions. He did a super job for ABC sports on TV and especially the Indy 500. They don’t make him like that anymore. I’m glad that I got to know him.