Rahal triggers ‘Indy Recovery Plan’

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.