Scraping into the Indianapolis 500 with three of its four entries and seeing his son Graham Rahal bumped from the field by teammate Jack Harvey wasn’t a scenario Bobby Rahal could imagine prior to May 21.
Fresh off pole position for the Indianapolis Grand Prix and a strong run for all of his Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing cars on May 13, the shock of seeing Graham fail to qualify was an unexpected lowlight to cap the highlights delivered the previous weekend. Slow at the Indy Open Test in April, the team returned to the big 2.5-mile oval for practice and qualifying after the Indy GP and showed minimal gains.
With Sunday’s Indy 500 offering no kindnesses to RLL as one-off driver Katherine Legge crashed into the pit wall and became the first driver out of the race while full-timers Jack Harvey (18th) and Christian Lundgaard (19th) moved forward from the back of the field but made no impact on the event, Rahal left the track with a firm view of what took place and what needs to change when they return next May for IndyCar’s biggest show.
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“Very disappointed in the performance of our team,” the 1986 Indy 500 winner told RACER. “There’s certainly a lot of introspection; we’ve been there before, not that I don’t take any pride in it, but we’ve been there before. The response will be that we’ll come back and win this race next year. We’re just gonna have to commit ourselves to not just doing things right, but doing the right things. And clearly, probably from a mechanical drag standpoint, we’re not. We’re not where we needed to be.
“Despite the fact that we spent time in the wind tunnel, we obviously missed certain things or just didn’t totally understand what we needed to do. And that’s got experienced people behind it, so you wonder about that. But clearly, it’s cause for introspection, and it’s a cause for determination. We’re not gonna do this again. We’re gonna take our place back where we should be, right up front. Only thing I can say is thank God we don’t have any more high-speed ovals left on the on the schedule. I really felt bad for our drivers because we let them down and obviously let down our sponsors. Thankfully, they’ve all been very supportive, but still, we all expect better.”
Three years ago, RLL won the Indy 500 with former driver Takuma Sato. Two Indy 500s ago, its newest winner, Team Penske, had two cars — Will Power’s and the affiliate entry for Paretta Autosport’s Simona De Silvestro –fighting like RLL to make it through the Last Chance Qualifying session. Turnarounds are possible, and despite the busy schedule that sees the NTT IndyCar Series go straight from the 500 to race this weekend at the downtown Detroit Grand Prix street festival, Rahal isn’t giving his team a long runway to find fixes to its Indy ills.
“I want the technical staff, as well as the management, [COO] Steve Erickson, [VP of Operations] Ricardo [Nault], to dig in now,” he said. “I asked them for what I call the ‘Indy Recovery Plan.’ And that was asked for right after qualifying. We have several weeks left, and at the end of [June], that plan will be defined. Then we will begin the process of improving our performance. We’re not waiting until the fall or winter. That starts now, because I think there’s a fair amount of work to do, things to look into.
“In the end, we are a proud team. We pride ourselves on our performances and the fact that we’ve won races and won Indy 500s and everything else. And that’s just totally not acceptable with what happened, so we’re starting to do something about that. Now. We’re not going to wait. This year, it was the result of not doing the right things over the last several years, and we paid the price for it.”
Having placed all three drivers in the top eight at the Indy GP, RLL should see an upswing in results as the series heads into a string of road and street courses. And while RLL’s owners are demanding swift changes to its competitiveness on superspeedway, Rahal says that isn’t the case with embattled Jack Harvey, who’s been the subject of intensifying rumors regarding the team’s desire to try a different driver in the No. 30 Honda before season’s end.
“Jack’s our driver,” Rahal said of the Briton who’s in the final year of a two-year deal. “We have time to determine how we want to go forward, and there’s no reason to rush. It’s all about focusing on the upcoming races and doing the best job we can. The chips will fall later and we’ll see where they end up. At this stage, Jack’s in for the season as far as I can see — Jack’s our driver. We are committed to him and I think he’s committed to us.”