AP News, April 4th, 2007
Every Wednesday night A.J. Foyt and his team dine on that Southern staple, chicken-fried steak. That's a foreign dish to Foyt's latest driver, Darren Manning, but the Englishman wouldn't think of skipping dinner.
"It's a ritual that I'm getting used to," said Manning, who's adjusting to the Texas drawls at Foyt's Houston race shop while the team adapts to his Yorkshire accent.
Racing great Foyt, a two-time championship car owner in the IndyCar Series, has fallen on hard times. His team last won a race five years ago, and it has been nearly 30 years since A.J. Foyt Enterprises sent a car to Victory Lane at a road course.
Manning, without a full-time ride after Chip Ganassi fired him midway through the 2005 season, seemed a strange choice for the empty seat in Foyt's No. 14 Dallara-Honda.
But the 31-year-old driver has reinvigorated the whole team.
In the season-opener on the 1.5-mile oval at Homestead, Manning ran in the middle of the pack until a mechanical problem ended his day, relegating him to 13th in the 20-car field.
"There was a fast pack and a slow pack, and we were fastest of the slow pack, which was good for us," Manning said.
Last weekend on the St. Petersburg street course, Manning qualified fifth and raced in the top five until a late-race spin. He wound up a lap down in 12th.
"Yeah, we're going to make mistakes, everybody does," said Manning, whose hands were badly blistered and feet were numb at the end of the grueling race. "It sometimes means we'll go backward before we go forward, and A.J. and I both know that. When we go backward, we're not getting upset; we're working it out."
Foyt, who has struggled with young drivers including his grandson A.J. Foyt IV, actually was smiling after Sunday's race.
"I said we'd be racin' up front again before too long," he said. "We've just been asleep for a while, but we did what we needed to do and we've got a good driver who's got experience."
And the team's equipment is now the equal of everyone else in IndyCar _ everyone's running Dallara-Hondas _ after struggling in recent years with underpowered Toyota engines.
Even better, Foyt, a hands-on owner, finally has hired an engineer to help prepare the cars.
"It's (engineer) Len Paskus and A.J. and myself," Manning said. "Len's the computer guy, and A.J.'s the feel guy. He understands what I feel from the car, which is perfect.
"It's actually a perfect combination, like Marco (Andretti) having his dad and his grandfather in the pit box with him and his engineer."
Joining Foyt's team guaranteed Manning would keep racing in style.
"It looked like I was going to have to move to maybe GTs, the American Le Mans Series, maybe race over Japan like I did in the middle of last season," Manning said. "I really wasn't looking forward to riding with a roof over my head for the rest of my career. Now I've got to make the most of my chance."
