This past weekend with the Indy cars at Infineon Raceway didn’t go well--at all.
Even though we changed everything but the paint on the No.14 ABC Supply car, we barely made it into the top 20 speed-wise. We started 21st, took a gamble on pit strategy to gain track position that didn’t pan out and finished 22nd. We’re still 14th in the points but we’re a little farther out of the top 10 than we were before.
Race morning I thought things were going to be good for the race because Darren Manning was more satisfied with the car after the morning warm-up than he had been the previous two days. In the race, he lost a spot to Buddy Rice on the first lap but then settled in.
We pitted with the leaders on the first yellow which put Darren 15th, right behind Marco Andretti. Other cars ahead of us had pitted before the yellow so they stayed out to gain track position—which they did. We ran 15th until we figured we could take a different strategy also to gain track position. I wasn’t in total agreement about pitting but I was willing to roll the dice.
In order to make this bet work though we needed another full course yellow. So there we were tooling around in the back waiting for a yellow flag that never came. You win some, you lose some. Hindsight is 20/20 and we didn’t play the strategy game early enough. If we hadn’t gambled, we probably would have finished around 15th or 16th which wasn’t so great either.
We never found the set-up he was looking for. It was a very frustrating weekend for all of us.
I want to congratulate Roger Penske on a great weekend with Helio Castroneves winning the pole and the race and his teammate Ryan Briscoe running second in qualifying and the race. Especially since they had their transporter with Helio’s cars burn up on the way to the track! A problem with a wheel bearing caused the fire to start and it wasn’t long before it was out of control. Luckily, no one was hurt.
I can’t think of another team that could handle that kind of a setback and still race that weekend. For them to dominate the way they did, well that was very impressive.
For our ABC Supply team, the best thing we can do is put this weekend behind us and focus on running well at Detroit. Last year we finished fourth after starting eighth so hopefully we have another top-five finish this season.
The Detroit Grand Prix at Belle Isle will be broadcast live on ABC-TV this Sunday at 3:30pm ET. Please tune in.
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.
By A.J. Foyt