Infineon
By A.J. Foyt


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.