Oilpressure

When Santino Ferrucci won the pole ths past Saturday, everyone seemed excited. Being a lifelong AJ Foyt fan, I was ecstatic. Kevin Lee and the rest of the NBC booth seemed as ecstatic as well. I was happy for both the driver and the team, and I thought this was going to be universally popular. Silly me.

Saturday night as I was perusing through social media, I noticed that the haters were out in full force. I really don’t recall seeing any comments against AJ Foyt or AJ Foyt Racing, except for those who are against their alignment with Team Penske. A few said that Larry Foyt had done a deal with the devil. To those people, I say the team was going nowhere fast by the end of the 2022 season. Something had to be done to reverse their fortunes.

Most of the angst, however, was aimed at Santino Ferrucci. It seems the diminutive driver from Connecticut has a lot of enemies out there – or else the few he has are very vocal.

Personally, I don’t get it. He is great with fans. He always has a huge smile on his face and he is a blast to watch on track. This past May, Susan and I went to Charlie Brown’s the morning after the Sonsio Grand Prix. Ferrucci was in there with jeans, a plain T-shirt and a baseball cap – no logos or anything that might suggest he was a driver. He looked about like any other customer eating breakfast.

When he got up to pay his bill at the counter, people spotted him and began calling his name. He smiled, chatted it up with some fans, posed for photos with others and seemed to genuinely enjoy doing it. I’ve seen other current and former drivers in that exact same situation. Let’s just say many of them were not near as gracious or accommodating. The smile you see on TV is the same smile he carries around all the time.

The personable driver is still unsigned for next year. Even without the bargaining power of winning a ploe on his resume, I fully expected him to be back at Foyt for next season. Both parties have had a mutual desire to continue this relationship. Saturday’s pole run just cemented it further.

During Sunday’s race, the broadcast booth alluded to the fact that many drivers don’t care for Ferrucci. They went on to explain that he doesn’t care to make friends with other drivers. That’s not what he’s there for. He is there to drive a race car to the best of his ability. It’s tough to do that successfully and not ruffle some feathers along the way. He would prefer to get close to his own team and the fans, and not worry about what his competitors think. Who else does that sound like? His boss, AJ Foyt, Jr.

But there are other reasons why many fans don’t like him. Some can’t forgive him for his behavior in F2 in 2018, when he deliberately made contact with his teammate at Silverstone. Granted, that is bad. You don’t deliberately hit anyone in racing, much less your teammate. There was some other boorish behavior that got him banned from Formula 2 that summer, so he came back home and tried to break into IndyCar.

There is no justification for that behavior. But you know what? He was 20 years-old when that happened. That doesn’t justify what he did, but how many of us did certain things at the age of 20, that don’t make us absolutely cringe? I know I did. If I were to list some of the stunts I pulled back in 1978, many of you would never come back here to read another thing I wrote.

Ferrucci is now a married man and has improved his behavior a lot. Granted, we saw signs of his fiery personality at Detroit, when he shoved Kyle Kirkwood and then said a few off-color comments about Kirkwood and Colton Herta on the air. It’s funny – when a 43 year-old Will Power does those things, we all laugh and think Power’s great. But when a 26 year-old Ferrucci does it. He is considered childish and has obviously reverted to his F2 days.

Why are some IndyCar fans so unforgiving? Were they that perfect when they were 20? If they were, they were a lot more mature and saintly than I was at that age. Or is it something else?

Digging deeper into some of the social media comments about Ferrucci, I learned that many don’t like him simply due to his political beliefs. Seriously?? Who cares??

There were 28 cars in the field on Sunday. I couldn’t tell you the political leanings of a single one of them (except for Ferrucci, after learning his leanings on Saturday night) and you know what – I don’t care how any drivers vote or lean. The Titans have a new coach this year. It never dawned on me to find out his political beliefs. All I care about is whether or not he can get his players to play well enough to win some games.

Is this just another reason to hate the guy, now that his F2 behavior is fading into the distant past, or is this the main reason to dislike him. Personally, I don’t care if Santino Ferrucci votes for Trump or Harris. I also don’t care if he is Catholic or Presbyterian. Nor do I care if he likes Coke or Pepsi; or if he is left-handed or right-handed.

All I care about is how he drives while he’s in the car, and how he interacts with fans when he’s out of the car. None of that other stuff amounts to a hill of beans to me. Do you know why? Because it’s none of my business, that’s why. Now, if he said he prefers Ginger to Mary Ann – that’s a whole other story. Mary Ann is the only choice and that’s not debatable. But all of the other stuff is his own business and certainly not a reason to determine if I like the guy or not.

Are there other reasons that some people don’t like him, or are we talking about a very vocal, but small minority? I certainly saw a large number of Ferrucci supporters on Saturday night, but it was the negative comments that caught my eye. Of course, the negative comments are always easier to remember than the positive ones.

The most important thing is that AJ Foyt seems to like him. Why wouldn’t he? He’s feisty and won’t back down, plus he’s shown he can excel in mediocre equipment. It’s an old saying about any driver…”I wonder what they would do in a Penske car”. As Ferrucci and the Foyt team get more intertwined with the Penske expertise, the results will come. They have actually already begun to.

I realize not everyone thinks like me (thank goodness). I don’t like every driver out there, and have some that I strongly dislike. Some of those that I dislike are very popular with other fans, so I get that. But I’m having a hard time understanding what there is to dislike about Santino Ferrucci. He doesn’t sound or act like a corporate automaton, but that’s what I like about him. He’s genuine and refreshing.

If you choose to hate on Ferrucci, hate him because he’s too aggressive on the track, or he took out your favorite driver. We need more on-track villains, anyway. But don’t hate on him over what he did at a stupid age, or because he likes Michigan instead of Ohio State. Hate him for the right reasons, not the wrong ones.

George Phillips

This entry was posted on August 28, 2024 at 4:04 am and is filed under IndyCar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.