Playing safe

Points leader Foust has a game plan for the low countries.

“This is kind of a low priority race, we’ve come here with a smaller team and very little promotional backup. I’ve not been to this track or the one in Holland but from what I understand they are not ones that will favour the Fiesta, so the plan is to play safe, try and keep the car together and get through with some decent results.”

Not, perhaps, the kind of attacking talk we might have expected from the championship leader at the start of the second half of the championship, but this came from a fairly subdued Tanner Foust for whom four of the five tracks in the last half of the series will be new territory. Coming on the back of the X Games and all its hype, it’s also understandable that Belgium, old-school to its boots, feels a little flat to the American. “Is it always like this here? There doesn’t seem to be much atmosphere,” he said as the OMSE team made final checks to his Fiesta ahead of free practice. The disappointment at not winning in the X Games is plain to see, but Foust says results have come from other directions. “Sure I would love to have won, but going there as the champion it was so much about PR and we did absolutely everything we could,” said Foust who even crossed the United States to appear on the New York-based David Letterman show in the run up to the Los Angeles-based X Games. Click here or go to the bottom of this post to see the Letterman show video. “Letterman is huge so doing the show was a big deal but it was tight. We had to drive the car across the country and back. It’s a 48-hour drive and they only had 48-hours to do it so there was no room for problems and they took enough guys in the truck that they kept going 24-hours a day, just changing drivers. It was a $30,000 tow bill but the exposure we got from that was amazing and it continued after the event because Letterman had the CEO of Ford Alan Mulally on the show this week and he talked about what I’d done there and how great the Fiesta was. I guess he [Mulally] would have been aware of the Fiesta through X Games, but that kind of stuff is great for us and for what we are doing, so for me results from X Games were more off the track this year,” said Foust.

This weekend is also going to be a little different for the American and the Swedish OMSE outfit as illness has prevented team boss Andréas Eriksson from making the trip to the event.

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