A.J. Foyt column: It’s great to be back

Friday, Sept. 24, 1999 | 3 a.m.

A.J. Foyt who owns the Indy Racing League team that Billy Boat drives for is writing a daily diary over the Vegas.com 500 race weekend. This is the first installment.

It's great to be back in Las Vegas. I've been all around the world, and this city offers some of the greatest entertainment anywhere-from first-rate casinos, shows and restaurants to top-tier racing.

Billy Boat, Kenny Brack and I spent our first day in Las Vegas (yesterday) signing autographs and meeting the great folks who come to Harrah's from across the country and the globe. Harrah's came on board as our primary sponsor in June, just before the Longhorn 500 in Texas. Now, we have the opportunity to race on Harrah's home turf, and we can't wait.

So today, after a great time yesterday enjoying Harrah's hospitality and meeting a number of the company's great customers, it's time to get down to business at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. As much fun as it was to sign autographs and try my luck in the casino, it's time to concentrate on the reason we're here -- to win the Vegas.com 500.

We're off to a good start. We did some testing here in Las Vegas several weeks ago, and it has really paid off. The Harrah's team is definitely ahead of the game in terms of knowing what the conditions will be like on race day.

Thanks to the testing, we have a good idea how the track will react to the traffic it handles during the course of the weekend, and we know what we have to do to be ready when the flag goes down on Sunday afternoon.

We spent a good part of today reviewing our specs-looking at tire pressures and trying to figure out which gear will give us the best performance under these conditions.

We've still got a lot of fine tuning to do -- as I'm sure all the teams do -- but we're already moving in the right direction.

So far the No. 11 Harrah's car has been really responsive. We've been pushing it a little already, and the car is reacting the way I want it to. Our speeds were pretty good today, considering that we've only had two practice sessions. We started strong this morning, just getting a feel for how the car was handling, and made some improvements for the afternoon practice session. Our speeds still aren't where we want them to be, but I'm confident we'll be there by Sunday.

Of course, the car is only one element of a successful formula. We also need a smart and aggressive driver, and we've got that in Billy Boat. Billy is in the right frame of mind to win this race. He's been hungry for a win all season, and there's no place he'd rather win than in Las Vegas, right in our sponsor's backyard. Harrah's has given us a lot of support, and we'd love to repay them with a win in front of a home crowd.

Las Vegas is a tricky place to race, though, so we have to keep looking at our systems.

Most of the other hot climates we have race in -- Dallas and Orlando, for example -- are really humid. Here, the air is dry, and dry air plays differently on the engine. Phoenix is really the only place we run that is similar, at least in terms of the weather. But Las Vegas is a more demanding track in some ways, so we have to be on our toes.

We know the other teams have come here with every intention of winning this race, so the pressure is on to develop a strategy to put us over the top. Fortunately, it looks like the weather forecasters are predicting the kind of weather we expected. That will help us out a lot, since we won't have to do any major overhauls on the car.

I mentioned that we made some fairly minor changes to the car after the morning practice session. We did some more tinkering following the afternoon session, and we're looking forward to tomorrow, when we'll see if we've generated any more speed.

We'll push the car a little harder and see how it reacts, and I'll be back online tomorrow afternoon to let you know how things turned out.

By the way, be sure to catch Billy tonight on Vegas.com Live, where he'll be taking your questions online from 5:30 p.m. to 6 p.m. You can write in with any questions you have for Billy about this race, the Indy Racing League or the state of motorsports in general.

I hope to see you at the track.