In another addition to the never-ending developments in the NTT IndyCar Series’ silly season, Juri Vips is expected to make a return in the coming months with the Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing team. Bobby Rahal wasn’t able to offer Vips a race seat …
In another addition to the never-ending developments in the NTT IndyCar Series’ silly season, Juri Vips is expected to make a return in the coming months with the Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing team.
Bobby Rahal wasn’t able to offer Vips a race seat this year in one of the three RLL Hondas, but the veteran NTT IndyCar Series entrant hasn’t given up on the Estonian. In fact, he wants to give him another chance to show his skills and be considered for a drive in 2025.
The 23-year-old contested two races for RLL to close the 2023 season in the No. 30 Honda formerly driven by Jack Harvey and made his presence felt at Portland where he qualified 18th — directly behind RLL’s Christian Lundgaard in 17th — and 13th at Laguna Seca before being shunted on the opening lap.
Despite his losing out to Pietro Fittipaldi with the No. 30 this season, RLL has kept Vips on the payroll and brought him to the races to learn from the sidelines. At some point over the last eight races, Rahal intends to drop him back into a car — a fourth RLL entry — and see how he performs in a hybrid IndyCar.
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“He’s a great young man and doing a lot of work for us on the simulator work. I know he’d rather be in a real car, and I feel very strongly about giving him a chance, so I expect to see that,” Rahal told RACER.
“Some of this depends on Honda in when they can support us with another engine, but I would think it would be a hybrid car, so later in the summer after Mid-Ohio. We don’t want to do too many races and lose his rookie status.”
With teams cutting or signing a number of drivers during the 2024 season, the pool of free agent talent to consider for new opportunities continues to evolve. Asked if he’d make Vips available to another team if they wanted to test or sign him, the 1986 Indianapolis 500 winner and three-time CART IndyCar Series champion is feeling somewhat protective of his employee.
“The reason we’ve done what we’ve done is I want to see him in our team on a full-time basis,” he said. “So that’s our goal for next year, for sure. We’re not there yet, but we want to keep him in our team. And I think that’s of interest to him, too.”
RLL is letting Vips log more miles in Formula 2, where he was a strong contender from 2020-22 and won three races, and then it’s a matter of locking in the IndyCar race he’ll do between July and September and figuring out where — if the budget is raised — he might fit in the team next year.
“Having said that, he’s doing a tire test for Formula 2 here in the next couple days,” Rahal added. “And so, you know, I’m not against him doing some things for other people so he gets more seat time. But no, our goal is for him to join us full-time and run for us.”
“Right now, it’s all about finding the financial backing to do whatever we want to do, whether it’s two cars, three cars, four cars, or whatever.”
Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing’s Danish ace Christian Lundgaard says his third career podium finish and second on the Indy road course was “the minimum” that he and the team were seeking from the 2024 Sonsio Grand Prix. Lundgaard took the lead from …
Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing’s Danish ace Christian Lundgaard says his third career podium finish and second on the Indy road course was “the minimum” that he and the team were seeking from the 2024 Sonsio Grand Prix.
Lundgaard took the lead from polesitter Alex Palou at the start of the race, went on to lead 35 laps, and finished third behind Palou and Will Power but ahead of Scott Dixon. He described his post-race mood as, “Happy to be disappointed, I would say. Yeah, I think that’s becoming an expression in the RLL engineering truck. Sometimes we’re just happy to be disappointed.
“I’m proud of the team. We qualified well at Barber, and I think considering how we handled Long Beach in terms of strategy — trying to get too much out of what I think we could have hurt us on the pure result. Going into Barber, it was a pure strategy of just get through the race and make sure that we get a good result, and coming here, there was a minimum, which was a podium. We got it, but I wanted it to be a win.”
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The Dane said he was wondering about his choice of a second set of primary Firestones on a day in which the alternate compound was faster and surprisingly durable. But he explained that the only set of alternates he had available before taking fresh ones for the final stint were well worn, and he doubted they would last.
“I think today on our performance we really did the best job that I think we could on the first two stints,” he said. “We were a little bold trying to put on another sticker set of primaries for the third stint, but the alternative was a very used alternate tire that we had to [run] a long way, and I preferred the primary tires there.
“The red tires were the preferred tires today, but going into the race, I think everybody was in the unknown. Everybody had a question mark — is it going to be 50/50 or 70/30 in terms of one compound being preferred? …I chose the sticker primaries because we were one of the most competitive cars in qualifying on blacks, on the primary tires. I didn’t see a reason why not to use them.
“But I think Alex was just fast today. He was fast here last year in May, in August. He’s fast wherever we go, really.”
The Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing IndyCar team is preparing for a significant change to its engineering group. Formula 1 aerodynamics expert Stefano Sordo joined RLL as its new technical director with plenty of fanfare in September of 2022, and …
The Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing IndyCar team is preparing for a significant change to its engineering group.
Formula 1 aerodynamics expert Stefano Sordo joined RLL as its new technical director with plenty of fanfare in September of 2022, and after informing the team of his intent to return to F1, the Italian will exit his post after the May 26 Indianapolis 500.
Following a humbling month of May in 2023 when one of the RLL entries owned by Bobby Rahal, Mike Lanigan, and David Letterman failed to qualify, Rahal and Lanigan made sizable investments into the team’s engineering group, which have made the team more competitive under Sordo’s management.
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“He’s working through our month of May stuff; we put a lot of work into our Indy ‘recovery project,’ as Bobby calls it,” RLL COO Steve Eriksen told RACER. “So he’s looking forward to seeing that through to its conclusion. The whole engineering group that he’s assembled is pretty impressive. We’ve got some really high-level folks in our program these days, which is awesome.
“And he’s working through seeing that completed with a successful month of May, given the challenges we had last year. I think we’re going to be in a lot better spot, not only because everyone of our own work, but also because Honda has put in a ton of work, too. We’re excited about that.”
Prior to the arrival of Sordo and Eriksen, RLL relied upon an ageing research and development model in which the team’s race engineers, performance engineers, and assistant engineers used whatever limited time they had between races to look for areas where more overall speed could be found and applied to their cars. With renewed financial commitments from Lanigan Rahal, RLL spent heavily on hiring more engineers and developing a new full-time R&D program that functions as its own entity within the team.
With the bolstered engineering team and structure in place, the impending exit of RLL’s technical director should be less of a disruption. At most of the other IndyCar teams, the loss of a technical director would have dire competitive consequences, but thanks to RLL’s relatively flat organizational chart, Sordo’s departure isn’t expected to affect the team’s on-track performance.
While Eriksen declined to comment on the details of Sordo’s upcoming departure, he did say that rather than start a search for a new technical director, the quality of the people in the engineering group could inspire RLL to rely on those within the team to lead it into the future.
“I think we’ve built up such a strong team of people that I feel like we’ve got the right group in place to be able to do great things going forward,” Eriksen said. “You spend a fair amount of time investing in good people and then the payoff comes later. And that’s absolutely the case here.
“We’re going to see the benefits of the team that Stefano put together far into the future. And definitely Bobby and Mike have been so supportive of that, which is absolutely wonderful.”
Eriksen made another move in recent weeks to strengthen the team’s Indy 500 resources by signing former RLL driver and 1999 Indy 500 winner Kenny Brack to support Graham Rahal, Christian Lundgaard, Pietro Fittipaldi, and two-time Indy 500 winner Takuma Sato.
Similar to the roles three-time Indy winner Dario Franchitti plays with Chip Ganassi Racing and 2013 Indy winner serves for Arrow McLaren, Brack brings a layer of insight and observation from a driver’s perspective that was warmly receive at the April Indy Open Test.
“I was so impressed with him,” Eriksen said. “He’s a megastar. My original thinking was, we put so much work into improving the cars, why not work to improve the drivers with the help of an Indy 500 winner? And Kenny sees so many things; his ability to observe and feed those observations back to our drivers and back to us has really been invaluable.”
Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing’s Christian Lundgaard flirted with being the fastest driver across the first three test sessions at The Thermal Club, and in the fourth and final outing, the Dane clinched first-place as the field of 27 drivers spent …
Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing’s Christian Lundgaard flirted with being the fastest driver across the first three test sessions at The Thermal Club, and in the fourth and final outing, the Dane clinched first-place as the field of 27 drivers spent the latter part of the two-hour window performing qualifying simulations.
Lundgaard’s 1m38.220s run, the fastest of the event, came amid huge gusts of wind and sand storms that caused a delay to the start of the session. Well behind Lundgaard was the Chevy brigade of Team Penske’s Will Power (+0.420s) and Scott McLaughlin (+0.504s), and the Arrow McLaren trio of Alexander Rossi (+0.591s), Pato O’Ward (+0.658s) and Callum Ilott (+0.669s).
“The wind actually helps you in all [the] really fast stuff,” Power told RACER. “Obviously going down the back straight you get a big tailwind, but then it’s not as good under braking. It seems like it should be slow, but it’s actually quite fast.”
The rapid-fire day concludes with qualifying for Sunday morning’s heat races starting at 5 p.m. PT on Peacock.
RAHAL LETTERMAN LANIGAN RACING No. 15 Honda: Graham Rahal (15th in 2023 championship) No. 30 Honda: Pietro Fittipaldi (did not compete) No. 45 Honda: Christian Lundgaard (8th in 2023 championship) How soon is now The chronicles of RLL in 2023 are …
RAHAL LETTERMAN LANIGAN RACING
No. 15 Honda: Graham Rahal (15th in 2023 championship)
No. 30 Honda: Pietro Fittipaldi (did not compete)
No. 45 Honda: Christian Lundgaard (8th in 2023 championship)
How soon is now
The chronicles of RLL in 2023 are well known: Stumbled hard out of the gates; miserable Indy 500 where Graham Rahal failed to qualify; hardcore rebound that delivered Christian Lundgaard’s first IndyCar win and an impressive close to the season across all three cars — including Juri Vips, the late replacement for Jack Harvey — which gave rise to optimism for how the team might launch its 2024 campaign.
It’s overstating the obvious, but Bobby Rahal’s head would explode if the new season starts like the last. For all of the additional money invested by RLL’s owners and sponsors to hire more people and pursue more speed, this truly is the one team in the series that needs to make an immediate impact for its own sake.
The good news is that based on what they’ve done during the offseason, the investments should pay off.
Smart change
Veteran RLL mechanic-turned-team manager Ricardo Nault had the look last season of a man who hadn’t slept for a year, and it was for a good reason: He was leading the team’s IndyCar and IMSA GTP programs at the same time, which added up to an ugly amount of travel and routine exhaustion.
Although he will be missed in the IndyCar paddock, RLL has taken mercy on Rico and assigned him to manage its factory BMW GTP effort alone, and elevated driver-turned-chief-mechanic Derek Davidson to the role of team manager for RLL’s IndyCar program. Davidson’s a wonderful choice for the position; he’s among the most humble and highly respected people within the organization. Rico leaves a big void, but Davidson will continue what Nault’s built, have the ability to only focus on IndyCar, and forge his own way of doing things that will benefit all involved.
Foyt swap
It’s not uncommon for IndyCar teams to hire personnel from each other’s programs, but it is rare when you get a swap of staff in the same exact roles. That’s the case with race engineer Michael Armbrester, who left RLL and the No. 30 Honda, to join A.J. Foyt Racing and engineer its second car, the No. 41 Chevy for Sting Ray Robb. In his place, Danielle Cucchiaroni, the former race engineer on Foyt’s second car (who moved to its primary car last season), has gone to RLL to…engineer the No. 30 for Fittipaldi.
Six years after his IndyCar debut, Pietro Fittipaldi finally has a full-time opportunity. Chris Owens/Penske Entertainment
Primetime Pietro
Pietro Fittipaldi’s IndyCar career has been a series of stops and starts. The 27-year-old from Florida is a veteran in one sense; he made his IndyCar debut in 2018, but since then, he’s completed just nine races in two partial seasons.
The fun-loving member of the famed Brazilian racing family has amassed plenty of top-tier sports car experience and even made two Formula 1 starts since he first appeared for Dale Coyne Racing, but the one thing Fittipaldi hasn’t had is a lot of consistent open-wheel races in the upper echelon of the sport. All of that changes with his first full-time drive in IndyCar with RLL. So what can we expect from Pietro? He’s been quick at times, but don’t mistake his age and deep racing experience for being ready to knock a Palou or Newgarden off of their thrones.
This is very much of a development year for Fittipaldi, who has the talent and the training to be an excellent IndyCar driver. Placing expectations on him to be that guy from the first race in a new team with a new race engineer would be unfair, but I don’t think it will take long for him to get in a groove and start delivering for RLL.
Second for Stefano
RLL’s new technical director Stefano Sordo, fresh from a lifetime spent in Formula 1, needed some time last season to acclimate himself to IndyCar’s spec car, oval racing, and a lot of new tracks. Towards the end of the year, RLL’s drivers were extremely complimentary of Sordo’s input to the team’s engineering group and its future direction, and the flattery continues as RLL is confident the Italian will have a much greater influence in all areas of performance.
Circling back to those big offseason investments, a lot of money went into hiring more engineers — Rahal says they nearly doubled the size of the department since 2023, and they’ve also brought in the excellent David Cripps as the head of oval R&D. A glaring weakness for RLL last year was its relatively small engineering team — compared to the huge engineering staffs elsewhere in the paddock — and that has largely been addressed.
On the clock
Christian Lundgaard is among the most coveted drivers in IndyCar, and with his RLL contract up at the end of the season, he’s another young charger who should draw plenty of interest if he chooses to leave.
It’s an interesting situation for the Dane to ponder. At any team that was above RLL in the standings, Lundgaard would be a powerful addition, but he wouldn’t become the No. 1 driver at a Arrow McLaren, Chip Ganassi Racing, or Team Penske, if they had vacancies to fill. At best, he’d be the No. 2, which wouldn’t be bad, but he’d be leaving an improving team where he’s established himself as the No. 1.
So that leaves it in the hands of RLL to make Lundgaard more competitive and give him a reason to stay. But we still have that question of whether it would be wiser to be the No. 1 at a team that’s on the move, but isn’t where it wants to be at the moment, or jump ship to a front-running team, and likely earn more money and win more races, but know that you’ll always fall behind a Pato O’Ward, Alex Palou or Josef Newgarden in the team’s eye.
Pietro Fittipaldi’s Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing entry for the Indianapolis 500 and Detroit Grand Prix will carry primary sponsorship from 5-Hour Energy. “We’ve been incredibly impressed by the RLL team in their preparation and professionalism and …
Pietro Fittipaldi’s Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing entry for the Indianapolis 500 and Detroit Grand Prix will carry primary sponsorship from 5-Hour Energy.
“We’ve been incredibly impressed by the RLL team in their preparation and professionalism and wanted to quickly expand our collaboration beyond the associate sponsorship,” said company president Jeff Sigouin. “Therefore, we’ve become the primary sponsor for the longest and biggest race of the year — the Indy 500 — and of our hometown race in Detroit. Both events require focus, energy and stamina to win… and those attributes are right up our alley.”
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In a week where the colors red, yellow, and black have featured prominently on new IndyCar liveries from Chip Ganassi Racing with Alex Palou’s car and Sting Ray Robb’s A.J. Foyt Racing entry, Fittipaldi’s No. 30 Honda continues the trend with its 5-Hour design.
“I’m very excited to have 5-hour Energy as my primary sponsor for the legendary Indy 500 and for their home race, the Detroit Grand Prix,” Fittipaldi said. “The 5-hour Energy Honda is one of the best-looking race cars I have ever driven and looks extremely fast. I’m looking forward to chasing great results on track with them all season and especially at the iconic Indy 500 and their home race in Motor City.”
Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing hopes to fill more than 10 vacancies within its NTT IndyCar Series program. Among its particular needs, RLL is seeking to hire all manner of engineers as its technical ranks have been depleted since the season ended in …
Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing hopes to fill more than 10 vacancies within its NTT IndyCar Series program. Among its particular needs, RLL is seeking to hire all manner of engineers as its technical ranks have been depleted since the season ended in early September.
“There’s really two things going on,” RLL COO Steve Eriksen told RACER. “One is yes, with Ganassi trying to hire however many people for their fifth car, and McLaren paying McLaren wages for people, there’s a lot of competition for talent happening. And some of the numbers that are being thrown around are, frankly, quite crazy. Unless you’ve got a benefactor that’s covering all those costs, it’s tough to cover it with sponsorship. That’s one thing that’s going on.”
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Under a new engineering initiative created by RLL technical director Stefano Sordo, the three-car team is also trying to expand its engineering group to better match the size and depth found within its championship-winning rivals.
“The other thing is under Stefano, he has created an organizational structure for the future that he’s been implementing,” Eriksen added. “And so a portion of the positions are to fill that structure up in the way that he’s laid out. So we’ve actually got a number of people that have started and some other ones that are starting in January, that are part of that build up so that we have an engineering organization that is prepped for success in the future.”
RLL got off to a rough start last season as its off-season engineering efforts did not deliver the improvements that were anticipated. Ovals were the biggest problem where all four of RLL’s Indianapolis 500 entries were slow and team veteran Graham Rahal failed to qualify for the race.
Eriksen, the ex-Honda Performance Development VP who joined the team in January and brings exceptional leadership and operational skills to the team, saw value in Sordo’s revised approach to RLL’s engineering organizational chart and has supported the necessary expansion that’s under way.
“I reviewed the structure that Stefano was proposing,” he said. “I was worried that it would be him coming from Formula 1 and having champagne tastes on a beer budget, but in reality, what he proposed was quite sensible. And I said, ‘This looks good, but we need to be essentially ‘budget neutral’ to do that.’ So that required some reshuffling of the makeup of the group to do that, and the net effect is we’ll have more people in engineering than what we started with.
“He’s bringing in a combination of people with IndyCar experience, some of which have already started and are already helping us out, and some that are coming from his relationships in Formula 1 that will build out that that chart.”
After placing too much reliance on its race engineers to oversee all of its engineering research and development projects in recent years, RLL is investing in dedicated R&D personnel to complement its race engineering teams attached to the Nos. 15, 30, and 45 Honda.
“In the past, I think one of the challenges we’ve had has been that unlike Ganassi for example, where they have an R&D group, and that R&D group does work year-round for anything that’s needed, whether it’s IndyCar, IMSA, Extreme E, or whatever, that’s not what we’ve had,” Eriksen said.
“It’s definitely the way you want to go, because progress can be made all year, regardless of what race you’re traveling to. And at Rahal, what I found was that they had depended entirely on the race engineers as their R&D staff, and you can see where that’s a problem. So we are building up staff that can be year-round, dedicated to making the cars go faster. And that’s where some of those new positions we’re working to fill have come from.”
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Pietro Fittipaldi will make his NTT IndyCar Series return with Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing, stepping into the No. 30 Honda piloted for most of 2022-2023 by Jack Harvey and by Juri Vips during the final two races of the recently-completed season. …
Pietro Fittipaldi will make his NTT IndyCar Series return with Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing, stepping into the No. 30 Honda piloted for most of 2022-2023 by Jack Harvey and by Juri Vips during the final two races of the recently-completed season.
Fittipaldi, who drove for Dale Coyne Racing during two stints starting in 2018, completes RLL’s three-car lineup led by Christian Lundgaard and Graham Rahal, who is expected to sign another extension to remain in the family-owned team.
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“I am extremely proud and honored to join Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing,” Fittipaldi said. “With the experience I’ve gained over the last few years in F1 and other racing series, I am looking forward to the challenge of racing in IndyCar, one of the most competitive and versatile racing series in the world. I want to thank Mr. Rahal, Mr. Lanigan, and Mr. Letterman for the opportunity and their trust and confidence in me. I can’t wait to get started.”
Fittipaldi’s latest duties have involved Formula 1 where the 27-year-old served as Haas F1’s test and reserve driver and in various sports car racing outings, primarily in Europe.
Vips was another leading candidate for the No. 30 opportunity after impressing the team in Portland and Monterey, but RLL opted for Fittipaldi, who also brings extensive oval experience to the operation.
“I’m very pleased that we’ve been able to have Pietro join RLL as the driver of the No. 30 car,” team co-owner Bobby Rahal said. “He has had previous experience in IndyCar in doing partial seasons with Dale Coyne Racing and impressively qualifying 13th at Indianapolis in 2021.
“I got to meet him then and since that time he has worked hard to become the reserve driver for Haas F1’s team. And from our discussions, I have been impressed with the maturity and experience that he will now bring to our program. I look forward to seeing what he can do over a full season of IndyCar competition in 2024.”
No NTT IndyCar Series team does more livery changes between races than Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing, and with yet another new wrap to apply to Graham Rahal’s No. 15 Honda, team manager Ricardo Nault explains how the process works as seen in the …
No NTT IndyCar Series team does more livery changes between races than Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing, and with yet another new wrap to apply to Graham Rahal’s No. 15 Honda, team manager Ricardo Nault explains how the process works as seen in the Monterey paddock.
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Christian Lundgaard topped the second NTT IndyCar Series practice session at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca on a morning where preparations were again interrupted by red flags. Lundgaard’s best of 1m07.6154s in the No.45 Rahal Letterman Lanigan …
Christian Lundgaard topped the second NTT IndyCar Series practice session at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca on a morning where preparations were again interrupted by red flags.
Lundgaard’s best of 1m07.6154s in the No.45 Rahal Letterman Lanigan Honda came with 20 minutes still on the clock, and to some extent was insulated against further improvement by a stoppage that ate up a large chunk of the remaining time. Ed Carpenter Racing’s Rinus VeeKay came closest with a 1m07.6548s that put the Dutchman on top for about 10 seconds before Lundgaard completed his lap.
VeeKay was a little fortunate to have simply been on the track long enough to set his time after he spun in Turn 5 during the opening minutes and came to rest in the middle of the track perpendicular to the approaching cars. Some quick hands from Romain Grosjean saved VeeKay from being T-boned by the Andretti Honda, and VeeKay was able to get himself going again.
The late red came courtesy of Santino Ferrucci, or more specifically, a component in the back of his car that began blowing white smoke as he exited Turn 9 with 11 minutes remaining. By the time the No. 14 Foyt Chevy had been retrieved there was just under four minutes remaining, and the track was too congested after session returned to green for any meaningful improvements.
Alex Palou wound up third fastest ahead of early session leader Alexander Rossi, leaving Kyle Kirkwood to complete the top five.
The low grip level away from the racing line, along with the sharp contrast between the grip level on the track surface and the painted curbs, continued to cause problems, and the 60 minutes were loaded with cars running off and into the gravel.
Most continued unscathed, however Pato O’Ward’s No. 5 Arrow McLaren Chevy needed a new left-front corner after he went off and hit the wall at Turn 3 10 minutes in. Later, Will Power’s No. 12 Team Penske Chevy snapped around at the entry to the Corkscrew and sent him into the gravel backwards. He required help from the AMR Safety Team to get the car pointed in the right direction again, but there was no apparent damage.
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