AJ Foyt Racing had as bad a season as you could imagine. There's reason for hope in 2023.
Nathan BrownLess than a month after the most debilitating, frustrating IndyCar season any team has seen in years, the AJ Foyt Racing shop in Speedway was full of smiles, excitement and hope Thursday morning. Pay no mind to its 13 DNFs across 43 starts in 2022 (more than double the series average rate), the shuttering of a full-time entry after a sponsor fell through and Foyt’s two remaining cars finishing last and second-to-last in points, team president Larry Foyt said the program was just happy to know what 2023 would look like before … well, 2023.
In recent years, Foyt’s two- or three-car programs were some of the last to come together. The team’s first of three driver announcements for the 2020 season didn’t happen until late-January. Though they announced Sebastien Bourdais’ full-season campaign in 2021 before the 2020 slate had ended, Dalton Kellett’s didn’t follow until three months later. And this past year, Foyt’s deal for Kyle Kirkwood came to light in mid-November, with the completion of the lineup for its ill-fated third full-time car not unveiled until a week before JR Hildebrand’s first race of his oval-only schedule.
For 2023, at least Foyt’s shops in Speedway and Waller, Texas could hit the upcoming two-month stretch before Christmas break with a driver in mind to build and craft its cars around.
“It’s just so refreshing,” Larry Foyt said Thursday on a media call. “Even though (the offseason) feels long for the fans because we don’t race for a while, it goes by so fast inside the race shop.”
A team in 'rebuild' mode for a decade or more
Foyt said he’s had very little, if any notable staffing changes outside his drivers, which gave him reason to shy away from calling this offseason heading into 2023 a complete rebuild. Driver changes are nothing new to those that have been around Foyt in recent years, a team that’s used seven different drivers to field seven full-time programs over the course of the past three seasons. It adds two more to the mix for 2023 with rookie Benjamin Pedersen and young, journeyman Santino Ferrucci, who has two full-season campaigns on his resume at 24 but who’s driven just eight races over the course of two years with three different teams.
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Perhaps more accurately, this is the team president’s latest of many attempts at a rebuilding process that’s tough to pin a start date to. The team’s placed just three drivers in the top-15 in points since the start of 2010, last won in 2013 and last finished top-10 in points in 2002. There are scores of American open-wheel racing fans who know AJ Foyt Racing far more for its existence as a largely back-marker team than for its GOAT of a namesake in Super Tex himself.
Larry Foyt is holding out hope that, albeit slowly, this two-driver tandem can begin to change that narrative.
“Last year, there were tracks we had speed on, and there were tracks we struggled on. We’re trying to work on those tracks that we struggled,” Foyt said. “Is Santino going to get everything out of the car and get us some good finishes, get things rolling back in the right direction? I really believe that. It’s not that we think consistently we’re going to be surprising people, but there’s no reason that we can’t have some really decent top-10s and even a little better.”
Since the middle of 2015, the team has consistently averaged five top-10s per year as a two-car program. Last year, despite all the excitement around its first returning full-time driver since 2019 and the addition of the defendant Indy Lights champ, Foyt logged just one in its 43 combined starts.
As an outsider who was often at the race track searching for future long-term opportunities – or in case he was needed to fill-in for a race weekend injury – Ferrucci summed up his diagnosis simply.
“This car has shown speed this year, without a doubt. It’s had its moments of brilliance, but it’s about how to make that consistent. The car also didn’t finish a lot of races because they had a rookie in the car,” he said.
Indeed, despite his promise entering 2022 and what many expect to be a bounce-back 2023 with Andretti Autosport, Kirkwood registered seven DNFs as a rookie – more than half the team’s total of 13. Even more carnage (for Kirkwood and the team at-large) came in practice and qualifying sessions. At least one segment of the Foyt team was rebuilding a racecar coming out of nine of the first 13 race weekends of the year.
“You get kinda beat down because you’re fixing cars all the time, and the guys get tired, and it’s a domino effect,” Foyt said. “All a sudden, we’re back in the points and we’re trying to climb out of it. And that was certainly disappointing because we did come in with a lot of optimism.
“But that’s motor racing.”
Cutting out the chaos and the noise
The team’s new drivers are approaching 2023 with measured excitement. With Pedersen, who begged his way into a shadowing program with the Foyt crew this past year while he went on to finish 5th in the Lights championship, there’s less urgency because he’s inked on a multi-year deal with his family understood to be providing the bulk of the funding.
Though Pedersen lacks the junior level racing results, if he can excel better in toeing the limit, he very well may be better off in the long run. When it comes to Ferrucci, it’s not hard to see that, at least from a pure results standpoint, he’s better equipped to drive the Foyt car towards the middle – or even front – of the grid compared to Kellett. As for the future of the Canadian driver, Foyt told reporters Thursday there remains mutual interest to put together another one-year program, and Kellett remains the only driver he’s even discussing a third full-time effort with.
“But it just comes down to people. You have to be able to have all the right people to make it happen,” Foyt said of his conversations with Kellett. “We’re not going to do anything unless it was really going to strengthen the team. We both don’t want to do it unless it’s going to be a really good program, and we’d have to certainly find some more people to make that happen.”
It doesn’t take long listening to Foyt talk about why he believed his three-car effort a year ago struggled – even before the No. 11 car fell off the grid – to see that it's unlikely Kellett will return in ’23.
“It all came together late, and unfortunately at that time, that was the only way the sponsor wanted to do it,” Foyt said, referring to ROKiT’s insistence a year ago to insert Tatiana Calderon into a seat in order to provide the bulk of the funding for Kirkwood’s ride. “So, for me to keep Kyle in a car, it was kind of a thing I had to do.”
That type of down-to-the-wire decision he made it tough to build with an eye to the future. With funding from the Pedersens, Foyt says he sees the makings of stability that, in a few years’ time, could begin to produce meaningful, long-lasting progress.
“You need to get the right driver and engineer working together and get them really to know each other, and we just haven’t been able to have that consistency. We’ve had different sponsorships, different engineers, different drivers,” he said. “I think we’re reasonable that we’re still rebuilding something, but there’s no reason we feel like, on a given weekend, we can’t have a really good result.”
Could Ferrucci be the driver Foyt's been needing for years?
A lot of that goes back to Ferrucci. After a 6th-place finish in the 2021 Indy 500 with Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing, the Connecticut-native was asked to return for the Detroit doubleheader. The same happened with Mid-Ohio and Nashville, all one-at-a-time, all while he was attempting to carve out a stock car career in the Xfinity Series. With very little practice time, Ferrucci put together top-10s in each of his first four starts with RLL and added 11th at Nashville.
In 2022, he took 9th as an last-minute injury sub for RLL’s Jack Harvey, starting from the back of the grid without a single lap of legitimate practice. For Dreyer and Reinbold Racing two months later, Ferrucci added a fourth top-10 Indy 500 finish to his resume in as many starts.
Over his 43-race IndyCar career, he has 18 top-10s, despite never running with a top-level team, and with only four starts within the top-10. Across his still young career, he’s made a name for himself as one of the best chargers on race day.
“I’d say this when they’d ask me what I thought (of the car): ‘Hey, a car’s a car at this point in the season. Let’s make little changes just to give me comfort.’ This will be the first season (since 2020) that I get to come back in and be like, ‘All right, let’s make this mine. Let’s start here, see where we’re starting and build from there,’” Ferrucci said.
“Right now in these winter months, is the only time we’re going to get development. Once the season starts, we’ve got to be ready to freaking roll here come March. Are we going to show up in St. Pete and light the world on fire? Absolutely not. But are we going to start with realistic goals, put the car in the top-10 and see how consistent we can be? Yeah, without a doubt.”