INDIANAPOLIS – After two seasons of particularly frustrating on-track performances, A.J. Foyt Racing president Larry Foyt says he expects his team to “get back to point-zero” for the 2020 season. Some of that will involve new faces in the garage, including newly minted full-time No. 4 car driver Charlie Kimball, but Foyt confirmed Thursday that one of the team’s staples over the past two years, IndyCar veteran Tony Kanaan, will compete for A.J. Foyt Racing this season.

“Oh, I’m sure he will,” Foyt said. “We’ve been working together, and we’re getting everything buttoned up. In a couple weeks, that news will be ready to come out.”

Since the 2019 season ended, both parties have said multiple times they were “close” to settling on a plan for the No. 14 car. Back in mid-December, Kanaan even said his “Christmas wish” was to have the plans for his 23rd season of open-wheel racing solidified before New Year’s. But things have progressed slowly, complicated by the team’s 15th- and 19th-place finishes in the season standings a year ago and the loss of longtime sponsor ABC Supply.

“We are in a bit of a reset, coming off a tough year,” Foyt said. “I want all the effort we’re putting in to start showing some results. Last year was such a tough year for us because our effort wasn’t equaling anything on the track we were putting in. That was very frustrating for everybody.”

The “reset,” Foyt explained, will come from refocusing the team’s approach to its pair of cars, mechanically. Foyt admits the team drifted a bit too “outside the box” in the expensive testing they invested in with shock absorbers and how the car setups meshed with their dampers.

In taking a couple of steps back from their experiments of 2019, Foyt believes the team working in the garage in 2020 will be able to find a better jumping-off point for this year’s 17-race schedule, rather than trying to continue to modify the setups they ended this fall with.

“It’s just stuff that a lot of times we felt like it showed well in off-track testing, and then when we got to the track, it seemed like when we tried it, it was the right way to go,” Foyt said. “But when the tracked rubbered up and things like that started to happen, all the sudden, we’re not where we need to be.

“And once you get into the season, it’s very tough to dig yourself out of a hole. And during that summer stretch we had after Indy with back-to-back races, it’s hard. There’s not a lot of testing at that time, and it’s hard to dig yourself out if you’re going down the wrong path. And we feel like we went down the wrong path last year.”

That rough summer stretch Foyt referenced, after Matheus Leist finished 15th in the 500, with Kanaan ninth, included just one top-15 finish between the two over a five-race span at Detroit, Texas Motor Speedway, Road America and Toronto. Kanaan did deliver the team’s first podium since 2015 with a third-place finish at Gateway to spotlight his three top-10s over the final six races, but it wasn’t enough to completely wash away the team’s roller coaster 2019.

In a way, Foyt said, it sets the team up better in the long-term, shedding some of the over-zealous expectations those on the outside may have held for years with such a prestigious name running the show. In terms of concrete goals for 2020, the team president said he expects the team’s two cars to contend for the second round of qualifying for the road and street races, which will in turn give its tandem more opportunities to run closer to the leaders from the green flag instead of playing catch-up every race day.

Additionally, he expects Kimball to compete for a top-10 spot in the series standings —no small feat when you consider that two full-time Andretti Autosport drivers (Marco Andretti and Zach Veach) and a newly-minted Chip Ganassi driver (Marcus Ericsson) found themselves outside it last year.

“Expectations aren’t really that high, and that’s okay. It’s a fine place for us to be,” Foyt said. “I think we can go out and surprise some people, and if we consistently show some speed, it’ll show we’re headed in the right direction. I think this will be great for all of us and be a great story.

“I don’t think we’re going to come out and set the world on fire, though that would be great. But we have a strategic plan of getting back to point-zero.”

Email IndyStar motor sports reporter Nathan Brown at nlbrown@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter: @By_NathanBrown