Watkins Glen
By A.J. Foyt


I'll begin by sending congratulations to team owner Dale Coyne and his driver Justin Wilson on a well-deserved victory at Watkins Glen! I had already left the track but if I’d been there I would have congratulated him personally. His team has come a long way in the 25 years since he himself first began driving Indy cars in 1984. Like me, Dale has seen a lot of changes in the sport and he has managed to weather them all. His team’s first win will be the most popular one of the season without a doubt.


The weather at Watkins Glen International was the best they’ve had since we’ve been racing Indy cars there. I was glad to get out of Houston where it was 104 degrees and rising. With temperatures in the 60s on Saturday, it was even a little chilly for this old Texan but it felt good. On race day the weather was in the mid-70s and it was really nice.


That’s about the only thing that was right at The Glen for my ABC Supply team. Well, we did get to see Vitor Meira who came to the race. He looked really good and he said he was anxious to get back in a race car. But he knows he has to wait on doctor’s orders. There’s no sense taking a chance on hurting it again.


My ABC Supply team was looking forward to racing at the Glen. We came with Ryan Hunter-Reay, the defending race winner, and we had a pretty good combination for the race car because we finished second to him last year.


Well, we decided to try to improve on the set-up and went in a different direction thinking it would be even better. But, it wasn’t better and we spent the only practice session we had figuring that out.


I told our gang to put the car back to last year’s set-up and sent Ryan out to qualify. He gained almost a second and a half in qualifying over his best lap time in practice. And he closed the gap to the leaders. He qualified 16th and he was disappointed. Last year he started third. We were disappointed too because we’d started eighth.


We made some changes for the final practice on race morning. There were some things he liked and some he didn’t but it was nice to have a final warm-up to figure it all out. We weren’t thrilled to be starting where we were, but we had some interesting company back there which included Helio Castroneves.


When the green flag was waved, Ryan got a good start but then went over the curb in turn one which cost him a spot. The next thing I saw on the TV monitor was some kind of skirmish in the back of the field and Ryan coming over the radio saying, ‘I’m done’ (or something like that). I couldn’t believe it but there was the 14 car with its left front wheel cock-eyed, and going very slow.


The replay showed that Castroneves might have missed a shift and triggered the chain reaction that caught Ryan out. Helio was running low and slow on the track—it looked like he tried to get out of the way but when the cars are bottled up like that, the guy in the back has no time to react. Ryan smashed into Rafael Matos (who’d braked to avoid hitting Castroneves) and sent Matos spinning. He was able to continue. After hitting Matos’ car, the No. 14 slid off the course and into the Armco barrier, destroying the left front suspension and front wings. Of course, the guy who triggers it all, goes on his way. Our guys are still in The Glen fixing the car before they head over to Toronto for the next race.


This is the second race in the three that we’ve run with Ryan that he’s been in, as he says, ‘the wrong place, wrong time.’ In his first race for us in Iowa, he got hit from a spinning Robert Doornbos which put him out after a lap.


Believe me when I tell you, it’s damn hard to get through a season like this because you keep thinking what else can go wrong? (I’m learning not to ask.) But I’ve been through it before (1966 comes to mind) and I know you just have to keep your nose to the grinding stone and try harder. And that’s what this ABC Supply Racing team is going to do.


Who knows, we may come up with the second most-popular victory of the season!