Is Graham Rahal turning a corner? Breakthrough found at Indy 500 track that's been 'deadly to me'

Indianapolis Star

18-05-2025

INDIANAPOLIS — Graham Rahal stood in the shadow of the Pagoda early Saturday afternoon and struggled to find the words — a surprise, maybe, because he'd played the starring role in this movie twice before.
It's the one where a veteran racecar driver in the twilight of his career starts the most pressure-packed two weeks of his career with an air of positivity, and 48 hours later, he's swearing profusely in the cockpit on the radio. Less than two more, he's beyond the point of dumbfounded, almost dizzy from the ways in which he and his team have run circles around the gargantuan issue at hand but remain clueless for the solution.
Saturday, after completing his first Indianapolis 500 qualifying run — one that would prove to be the second slowest four laps run all day among the 61 completed — Rahal came to what felt as if it might be the climax of this Greek tragedy of his taking place in Speedway the last five years, starting with a near-miss third-place finish in 2020, followed by a backbreaking pitstop failure he'll forever believe robbed him of a win in 2021, a year in utter mediocrity in 2022 and then months of May in 2023 and 2024 where every waking moment ahead of the Last Chance Qualifier felt only increasingly more dire.
'Yeah, I mean, I don't really have a lot to say, you know?' Rahal said midday Saturday, taking a nearly 5-second pause to muster more. 'I don't know. The hard part of all this is, I don't know how much more we have.
'The car doesn't respond to change. Since Tuesday of this week, even in race trim, it just doesn't want to do anything, and unfortunately, that keeps getting worse and worse. I'm not really sure what to say. I'm crazily disappointed, but I can't say there isn't a stone we haven't turned over, other than switching cars, and in my experience, switching cars isn't the answer. (Expletive), it feels like "Groundhog Day" every time I come back to this place. It's certainly getting old. I can tell you that.'
Perhaps even more worrisome, Rahal would go on to explain, is that on a day where to the naked, untrained eye, speed appears to be the sole crucial element to seal one's fate, speed was by no means lacking. Speed, though, means very little when slamming one's foot to the floor feels akin to a death wish in a sport where drivers risk their lives every day in pursuit of eternal glory. Because Rahal was lifting in every corner, on every single lap, and sometimes not even able comfortable enough doing that to manage to stay in it for four of them.
Whereas the last two years he couldn't wish his No. 15 Honda machine fast enough around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Rahal finally had a bullet in the chamber to use, but a stuck trigger that seemed to make it utterly worthless. It would appear at the time — so much so, that Rahal himself outright publicly predicted it — that Rahal again would find himself starring in an Indy 500 Last Chance Qualifying late Sunday afternoon, his fate perhaps held in a gust of wind here or a brief moment or two of cloud cover there with reputational destruction on the line.
'I anticipate we'll be in the bottom three, no matter what, and I anticipate us running tomorrow, no matter what,' he said. 'The confusion's almost higher (than the last two years) because of the fact you know you have a car fast enough to be in the field, but how do you make it do it when all your teammates are generally happy or have a larger operating window to work form?
There is perhaps no moment more when Rahal's been more enthused to have been proven wrong.
Because boy, was 2025 pitched to be a monumental, foundational turnaround season for a program that just watched a driver many believed to be an almost irreplaceable cog in its near-term success eagerly walk to what he believed to be greener pastures, and then rattle off three consecutive podium finishes for good measure.
Last offseason was one where Rahal, his father, team co-owner Bobby Rahal and Co. did what's ultimately the toughest thing to do for any business owner: Admit the way you attempted to correct an old failure was wrong in and of itself.
The younger Rahal will put it plainly. 'I wasn't a huge fan of the past regime,' he told IndyStar in February, a reference to the team's ex-technical director Stefano Sordo who was hired by Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing in the fall of 2022 after a year in which the team's veteran driver dipped from seven top-5s to two and seventh in points to 11th. More importantly, the team went from winning and finishing third in the Indy 500 in 2020 and leaving IMS in 2021 believing devoutly that Rahal had the best combination of strategy and speed on the grid to being a team of nobodies in 2022
And so they took a flyer on one of Europe's best engineering minds, who Rahal said would go onto micromanage projects, largely refuse to delegate and generally take the team down improper paths of development purely unfit for the world of IndyCar.
'We'd do a lot of development, and then it never would get implemented properly,' Rahal said. 'Some of that came down to staffing, but the other part was leadership not delegating correctly.'
That first May with Sordo's guidance led to the team's darkest day in recent memory, as three of that year's four LCQ spots were filled by RLL full-time entries. Eventually Jack Harvey was forced to bump Rahal out in miraculous fashion, leaving his veteran teammate an emotional mess sitting on his side pods wondering how something could have gone so drastically wrong. Sordo would only last only one more May, with his departure made public last spring even before cars kicked into high gear for the Month of May. His departure welcomed in a run of new research and development projects and a team-wide leadership restructuring that team leaders hope would add talent in the holes in which RLL needed it most, while simultaneously promoting those on the inside who were ready and prepared to.
Though RLL made a tidal wave of changes in the month following Rahal missing the '23 500, this time, the two Rahals said, felt different.
Somehow, though, the Rahals found themselves answering questions during the team's annual Fast Friday news conference about uncertainty and a lack of performance and the same eerie signs that always have seemed to have worked their way into the RLL storylines come Thursday and Friday of practice week before wreaking their havoc during the weekend.
'I think it's been a challenging, but positive week for everybody,' Rahal said Friday. 'I felt like the guys did a wonderful job finding some speed in the offseason, and I remain positive about that.
'We'll go out there and do the absolute best that we can. There's lots of reasons to be positive throughout the team, and we're looking forward to the challenges ahead.'
Tuesday, before he'd turned a wheel this month on the IMS oval, the youngest Rahal was celebrating the ways in which he believed Honda had made gains against Chevy entering this year's Indy 500, following a year in which his team's minor deficiencies were magnified by an undermatched Honda internal combustion engine. From 2023 to 2024, Rahal loves to say, he believed RLL had closed the gap to Chip Ganassi Racing by leaps and bounds. And so even if Rahal was nearly bumped for a second consecutive 500 last year, he believed the role in which his team played in the matter had a smaller impact that what the ultimate results may show on paper.
'To me, if it doesn't work, I don't know where the hell you go from here, because I see it. I see all the stones have been turned over, and I don't possibly know what else you could look at,' Rahal said. 'So at least it's nice to feel that heartbeat at the test. I feel like we've got a chance. We've got some pace.
'I'm gonna be really shocked if we're not in a better spot. I don't like to get too ahead of myself in that regard, but I really think it looked a lot more positive than before.'
And so shocked Rahal would be four days later, so utterly fed up with the questions around he and his car's clear lack of performance that he was mentally preparing himself to be in a Sunday afternoon spat for a spot in the Indy 500 yet again.
Except when it was his turn again a few hours later to make what felt on the outside to be a rather feeble attempt to change his fortunes, Rahal was suddenly in the mix. By no means was his four-lap run anything more than average at best on a day in which excellence is rewarded, but it was in the show. And miraculously, it stayed there through the sounding of the pistol shot.
He speculated after the fact that the noticeable drop in speed between the open test and Friday may have been triggered in part by the swapping out of an underwing on Rahal's car after he wall banged the IMS outer SAFER barriers during last month's open test.
'After that second run, I felt a million times better. That's a lot more like it should be, and so if we can just take that balance and refine it a little bit, then we'll be even faster,' Rahal said. 'This place has been absolutely deadly to me the last 4-5 years, as far as my emotions, and the past week, I've been exhausted at the end of each day more than ever before, and that's what it does to you. It takes it out of you.
'Now, I can enjoy tonight with my family. They came last night. I hadn't seem them in a month because I've been on the road, and they've been at home. But it's great to see them and enjoy tonight a little and get some sleep, because I didn't sleep worth a damn last night, and that's all I really wanted. I just wanted to be able to sleep well tonight. I know that sounds stupid, but that's all I was hoping for.'