50TH ANNIVERSARY SEASON GETS UNDERWAY
By A.J. Foyt

Fifty years, five decades, half a century. Any way you say it, it’s a long time. In racing Indy cars, it’s a lifetime. Mine anyway.

Looking back, it seems like several lifetimes, especially when I think about some of the accidents that I survived. Back then, the cars weren’t nearly as safe as they are today.

Reporters have been asking what I think has changed the most since I started racing cars. It’s safety, no question. The cars today are a thousand percent safer than they used to be. Don’t get me wrong, racing is still dangerous but it’s not as dangerous as it used to be.

The other thing that has changed is the technology and all of the regulations that have come with it. With all of the computers and stuff, it’s taken the creativity out of designing race cars. You don’t see the innovations that you used to see.

It used to be that with the new season, there would be new cars that were as individual as the craftsmen who built them. Now mechanics just do R and R, remove and replace. Back when I started, if a part broke, you made a new one. Now you just buy a new one. Of course, the older cars weren’t quite as reliable as the cars we race today.

The manufacturers of the engines and the chassis have made the cars more consistent in their performances, which is a good thing. The Honda engines never blow up and it’s rare that a part fails on a Dallara chassis.

Our season opened this past weekend in south Florida. For the first time ever, we started the IndyCar Series season with a night race. We had some rain at Homestead-Miami Speedway and I thought the Saturday night race might be delayed until Sunday but we got it in after all.

Darren Manning returned to racing in the Series after a 20-month leave of absence. Despite having tested at the track last month, we still had to hunt for the ideal set-up on Friday. We never found the ideal settings on the ABC Supply car but we did find something he could race with. He was pretty happy with the car overall but it was a little tricky on cold tires and that contributed to our mishap in the race.

Darren started in 15^th spot and had moved up to 11^th when he was trying to lap a slower car about four laps after a pit stop. The tires needed about five laps to come in. Darren went wider than he wanted to because the tires didn’t have enough heat in them; he slid into the marbles and then brushed the wall. The right rear suspension was damaged and we were done for the night. We ended up 13^th.

We were disappointed naturally but I was impressed with his focus during the race. He was very good on restarts and his in and out laps during pit stops were consistently fast. And for his first oval race in a year and a half, he showed that he hadn’t really missed a beat.

Our ABC Supply crew had very good pit stops for the most part. They had a miscue when a wheel weight came off the tire they had just put on, which meant a second pit stop to change tires. If the wheels aren’t balanced they vibrate and make the car shake. We were fortunate that it happened during a caution period or that could have been very costly.

We did having something to celebrate however when my Silver Crown team finished one-two in the black and gold Greer Specials at Homestead on Friday afternoon. My good friend George Snider came in from California a month ago to prepare the cars. He is overseeing that program for the year. It takes a lot of weight off my mind knowing that he is in charge of it.

I hired Tracy Hines to drive the No. 14 and he won the 100-miler by using his head and conserving his car. Pablo Donoso, a protégé of my former Indy car driver Eliseo Salazar, drove my No.11 car to a second place finish. It was the highlight of the weekend.

We tested at Sebring’s road course on Tuesday with some other teams that also have new drivers this season and it went very well. Out of the eight cars that tested, we were the fastest. We found a good set-up and Darren’s strengths in road racing really came out.

So we head to St. Petersburg with a good baseline for the street race this weekend. The Honda Grand Prix of St. Petersburg will be televised live Sunday starting at 2:30pm on ESPN.