Long Beach Grand Prix
By A.J. Foyt


It’s been 14 years since I’ve been to the Long Beach Grand Prix so I knew we had our work cut out for us.


Everything has changed. There are a lot more buildings and shopping centers than I remember. The area was really a lot nicer than the last time I was there. The most important changes for us were those on the track; it is completely different. But the one thing that didn’t change were the bumps. It was bumpy then and it’s still bumpy. That’s usually the case when the race track is made up of city streets.


My driver Vitor Meira had never been to the Long Beach Grand Prix so he was one of the few who’d never driven there before in any series. It’s a temporary street circuit--you can’t test on it ahead of time. On Friday, he spent the first hour practice session learning the course and how the car behaved on it. The second hour session was spent figuring what he wanted from the car. I thought he held his own.


We made some changes for the half hour practice we had on Saturday before qualifying but looking back, they probably weren’t big enough changes to give us a solid direction. We didn’t have the ABC Supply car under him where he could attack the course. It was obvious because he qualified 20th out of 23 cars.


We made some more changes for the race, which seemed to be in the right direction based on the race morning warm-up.
Starting that far back, we settled on doing the race in just two stops. That meant running the first stint on the red alternate tires which are softer but they don’t last long. He really didn’t like the car when the tires went away—which they did pretty quick; he said the car was very loose. We told him he needed to hang on until our fuel window. He did and he was glad to get the black primary tires on the car (it’s a harder compound but they last longer). He looked pretty good in the beginning of the fuel runs and was able to challenge for positions.


Our ABC Supply crew did a great job on pit stops again, both were in the low eight-second range even with a front wing adjustment on the second one.


The two-stop strategy was working until those yellows came out with about 10 laps to go because people who needed fuel were able to save enough to make it to the end. Vitor was hanging in there but with seven laps to go, Alex Tagliani got by him for 11th on the restart lap. He took Vitor a little wide which let Graham Rahal get by too. We told Vitor to try to get one of those spots back and we probably shouldn’t have because he did try. He got alongside Rahal on the last lap but couldn’t make the pass. I think he picked up some of the loose rubber outside of the groove and he never made it out of turn 10. He said the car just went straight into the tire barrier.


When you get that stuff on the tires it can feel like something broke. I don’t think anything did, and Vitor didn’t say he thought something broke, he wasn’t sure what happened. We’ll go through the data and look the car over carefully but I think it was the junk on his tires that messed him up. The car had damage to the nose/front wing assembly (again) and the right side suspension. It hurt because it happened on the next to last turn in the race. He dropped from 13th to 14th place and we dropped from ninth to 14th in the points.


Vitor’s still got stuff to learn about working with us and he’s learning real quick but at the same time, we didn’t give him a top-10 car at Long Beach, so it really made for a bad weekend. We did some things right but we also did some things wrong.


All in all, I think Vitor did a good job. We were under adverse conditions and so was he. Let me just say that we’re all happy to be headed to Kansas Speedway this week!


The race will be televised live Sunday, April 26th starting at 4pm Eastern time on Versus (VS). Look for it near the other sports channels.