Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing is making a concerted effort to move forward in the IndyCar’s pecking order, and has found old performance strategies that needed to be revised.
The team has seen hints of strong performances this season, especially during qualifying where it has placed multiple drivers in the Firestone Fast Six on two separate occasions this year.
The team’s veteran driver Graham Rahal pinned a lot of this year’s improvements on the onboarding of Team President Jay Frye, who joined after working as IndyCar’s president for multiple years.
Rahal explained that the fresh engineering mindset is doing a lot of work to redirect the team’s efforts in a more fruitful direction.
“We see all the negatives and so on, but the team has made huge strides this year,” said Rahal. “The downside obviously has been the performance on the ovals for sure.
“Having said all of that, […] we’re finally getting some stability in the engineering corps that’s going to help us a lot.
“We’ve had a lot of turnover the last four years. We’ve had a lot of changes. We’ve had a lot of different methodologies come through.
“We’ve had, honestly, to unwind a lot of the things that we did over the last two years and backtrack on them, even with shocks and dampers and aerodynamics and a lot of things.
“Unfortunately when you’re in this position, your test days are the race weekends. I mean, it’s just the fact.
“For us, we’re trying our best to figure out what is going on and why the ovals have been a bit of a struggle, but I think there’s some big questions. Lots going on, but I do think Dad [Bobby Rahal] is correct that we’ve made a lot of strides. We’re in a much better position.”
Sunday pace still needed
The team’s three full time drivers have only one single top 10 finish throughout the first half of the 2025 season, placing them well down in the points standings.
Recent performances in qualifying and portions of the race have shown improvement, including a breakout pole for rookie Louis Foster in Road America. But Sunday’s results are still not on the level of 10 years ago when Rahal scored six podiums and finished fifth in the championship.
The recent efforts by the team continue to provide encouragement for the entire crew, and have led to increased interest from others in the paddock.
“I think RLL is an attractive place for people,” continued Rahal. “There’s certainly employees and people that are interested in coming — engineers, in coming to work with us that maybe weren’t over the last few years.
“Definitely a better environment, and hopefully we can continue to move that forward with Jay [Frye] and Dad and Mike [Lanigan] and the entire organization. I think there’s a lot of reasons to be positive.
“We need to execute, me and the team, at a higher level, and if we do that, there’s no doubt that we can take the fight to these other guys. And I think we can do it. We’ve just got to continue to work and get better.”
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