Written by Archie O’Reilly
On track for a worst championship finish in 10 years, Graham Rahal is not shying away from the disappointment with his 2024 IndyCar campaign so far. He knows it has not been up to standard results-wise.
But amid a tough campaign on paper to date, there is distinct positivity from Rahal about the progress being made at his Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing (RLL) team. This year’s results sheets do not tell the whole story, even if that does not diminish Rahal’s dissatisfaction.
“I’m extremely disappointed - I won’t sugarcoat that,” he said. “I think you guys all know me well enough to know that I don’t do that… I’m extremely disappointed at the way that we’ve performed.”
Rahal sits 16th in the standings after nine races, tracking for a worst championship finish since he came home 19th 2014. He has only twice finished and twice qualified inside the top 10 this year but that does do Rahal’s year justice. Optimism continues to emanate from him and the team.
“There’s been times like Mid-Ohio where we did have some pace but we didn’t improve even in the race,” he said. “We just never improved through the weekend and others caught us and others were just better. By the end of the weekend, we weren’t the fastest - we weren’t even in the top five or top seven fastest.
“Those are difficulties that I think are a little bit frustrating. But I will say this: on a whole, I think we’ve been much more competitive than we were last year, which is going to shock people I say that. But there’s a lot of places that we have gone that we have been much, much closer and faster than we were last year.”
RLL won four pole positions as a team in 2023, two of which Rahal was the recipient of, firstly in the second Indianapolis road course event - when he went on to finish second to a masterful Scott Dixon drive - and then in Portland. Teammate Christian Lundgaard was also a double pole-sitter, including en-route to winning in Toronto.
But there were low moments too. All three full-time entries had to return for Last Chance Qualifying for the Indianapolis 500 and Indy-only Katherine Legge only marginally made the field on Saturday. Rahal would go on to be bumped from the race to bring to a head an admitted downward trajectory in the years prior.
After a year of tireless work towards improvement, there were signs of improvement in the Month of May this year. One-off entrant Takuma Sato made the Fast 12 in qualifying, and while Rahal still had to contend with Bump Day and qualified 33rd, race-day finishes from positions 13th through 15th signified a notable upturn for the team.
“You need to look at the Indy 500,” Rahal, 15th-place finisher, said. “I understand I still qualified 33rd - I am well aware. But if you look at our gap to Ganassi last year, it was like six miles an hour. And if you look this year, it was like one-and-a-half [miles per hour]. That’s a big change. That is a big change.
“I think we’ve done an okay job in many areas but I think the future is really bright when I look at the changes that we’ve had mid-season here. We’ve had a couple people leave that I thought were positives, were good things that they moved on. It has allowed some other young stars to come up and shine that maybe were held in the weeds there for a little while.”
One other change at the team is that Lundgaard - their first race-winner since Sato won the Indy 500 in 2020 - was announced last week to be departing the team for Arrow McLaren in 2025. He has three IndyCar podiums to his name, including third place on the Indy road course with the team’s best result so far this year.
But while it is a blow for the team to lose a 22-year-old regarded as a future championship-winning driver, Rahal maintains that prospects are good at the team in the long term.
“Everybody is in good spirits,” he said. “The team has got great opportunities ahead for drivers so I don’t think that that’s what the main focus is right now. It’s obviously never good to see people leave the organisation but I don’t think that any of us were surprised by the team in which he went to.
“Good for Christian. As I told him via text, I wish him nothing but the best. I feel like I’ve been a part of his development as a driver and a racer in particular when he came in; he was fast but his race craft struggled a little bit and he’s come a long way in that regard.
“He’s got a hell of a future ahead of him. Obviously it would have been good to see him win with us some more but he’s made that decision so we turn the page. I think the morale is good. Everybody is looking forward to the future and that’s going to be the way that we approach things. That’s all we can do. Motorsport is a business and it changes all the time.”
Former Formula 2 driver Juri Vips is on RLL’s books as a reserve driver, has attended races in 2024 and has spent time in the simulator since a pair of outings in their No.30 Honda to close out 2023. He is evidently held in high esteem by the team, who at the start of the year expressed their desire to get him in a race seat again as early as some point in 2024.
Whether Vips slots into the No.45 Honda or somebody is acquired from elsewhere, Rahal does not appear fazed by what the team’s lineup could be next year.
“The future of the team is extremely bright,” he reiterated. “Even [when] Christian moves on, that’s not going to detract us or take away from what we’ve been able to do. I think the opportunities ahead are really good.”
As much as a glance at his results does not back this up, things could look very different from a performance standpoint when a deeper dive is taken into Rahal’s campaign. Lundgaard’s peaks of a podium and two further top-seven finishes display the team’s potential.
“While I’m disappointed we’re 16th in points, if you look at our early season in particular, we just missed so many opportunities, fuelling issues or really untimely yellows,” Rahal said. “We were running well at St. Pete, running really well at Barber… just absolutely killed our strategies. That happens sometimes. It’s just frustrating when it happens consistently.
“When you look at Laguna Seca as well, we would probably [have] finished not top 10 but right at it. And after where we started, you would have taken that at Laguna. But instead got caught up in somebody else’s mess [collecting a spinning Kyffin Simpson]. There’s been a lot of that this year.”
Rahal is grateful for his years of experience in IndyCar in a season as frustrating as this. And there is no better time for a turnaround than at the Iowa Speedway doubleheader weekend, which is promoted by one of RLL’s primary sponsors, grocery chain Hy-Vee.
“In my position, unfortunately I’ve been through that a lot and so I’m experienced with it,” Rahal said. “You’ve just got to put your head down and keep working. All you need to know is you can go to Iowa this weekend and win the double. That’s the truth.
“Things in this series are so competitive nowadays - it is so close at all times that it’s very, very frustrating. But it’s also cool to be a part of an era in motorsports like this that’s as close as it is.”
RLL’s oval struggles extended beyond just the Indy 500 last year. Rahal showed speed at Iowa to qualify 13th and sixth but crashed out of the first race and tumbled to 20th in the second. He started 21st and finished 20th in the other shorter oval race at World Wide Technology Raceway, better known as Gateway.
It will be imperative for RLL to undergo an upturn with six of the final eight races of the 2024 season to be run on ovals, with a doubleheader on the returning Milwaukee Mile and season-ending race at Nashville Superspeedway added to the equation.
“I think we have work to do still,” Rahal said. “I think Iowa we can be very competitive - I feel strongly. But Milwaukee we struggled as a team [when testing], point blank. I felt like Nashville we were okay - we just did a tyre test so I only ran a few sessions... I barely ran but we were okay. It’s an area that we need to improve but we’re going to work hard at it.”
Rahal believes the package IndyCar brought to the Milwaukee test “needs some work” and that the tyre was too hard for the track’s grip level so things may yet improve on that front. Ultimately, his priority is to finish every race - first of all both Iowa races, run within 18 hours of one another with the opening race a night-time event.
“We’re going to want to qualify towards the front, be with the good guys and try to get rehydrated after that race,” he said. “Saturday night, I know it’s evening but it’s still going to be hot, it’s still going to be physically extremely demanding.
“It’s going to be a very tough weekend, coming off of Mid-Ohio, which on a physical standpoint was about the most physical thing I think I’ve ever done.”
The expectation is that Iowa may be a clean slate in terms of the pecking order after a partial repave of the track, which saw record speeds of around 190 miles per hour and lap times of beneath 17 seconds in a recent test. The physical toll with what was observed at the test is also anticipated to be extreme with two races in high temperature in such a tight period.
With a few crashes during that test, the series has taken what Rahal believes to be 300 pounds of downforce off the cars to reduce the speeds somewhat. Firestone are also set to provide more tyres for teams to facilitate a high-line practice session given concerns that the second lane may not be usable as a result of the repave.
If drivers play ball in the high-line session and help to rubber in the second lane, and if issues with a lack of tyre degradation are alleviated, then Iowa promises to be a phenomenal spectacle as always.
“As I kept telling all the guys in the [drivers’] meeting, you’re going to want [the second lane] as much as anybody else,” Rahal said. “You’re going to want that fresh air. It’s in the best interest of everybody to work towards it and I think we will.”
Rahal is confident that concerns about a difficulty passing, compared to the usual tally of considerably over 1000 overtakes, will be unfounded given how quickly the bottom lane rubbered in during the recent test. This same rubbering in should be possible with the second lane to create “a hell of a show” in both the night and midday races.
“I think that the second lane will come in and it will be fine,” Rahal said. “I remember Kyle Larson, his first test at Iowa, he texted me right away and said it was a one trick pony, it was a one lane racetrack. And then you watch the Iowa NASCAR race and that wasn’t the case. They all worked together. They applied that second [lane].”
If the competitive balance is reset as expected amid the new track surface, with Team Penske and Josef Newgarden having dominated recent years, the race could be elevated to an even higher standard than usual.
“Iowa has always put on a great race,” Rahal said. “I get that Penske has dominated, but the mid-pack and everybody else, it’s always an exciting race because there’s a lot happening. Obviously Penske has a huge leg up when it comes to the dampers.
“The dampers and the shocks that they build in house, go look at them on the cars because they look like aliens compared to every other damper in IndyCar - they’re a totally different thing. So they dominated but that’s gone this year at Iowa. This is a fresh take on what Iowa is going to be. I think that’s great for the fans. I think it’s great for the opportunity.”
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