A strong second half of the 2022 season, $20million worth of investment for a new headquarters and an ex-Formula 1 aerodynamicist taking over as technical director gave rise to fresh expectations for one of IndyCar’s biggest teams.
And now it’s won a race (ending a three-year drought) with gem Christian Lundgaard in Toronto, taking a victory before Arrow McLaren has this year to boot.
So you might think ‘mission accomplished, all good from here’. Only it’s far from that simple.
Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing, co-owned by IndyCar champion, Indianapolis 500 winner and sometime Formula 1 team boss Bobby Rahal, world-famous TV presenter David Letterman and long-time American motorsports backer Mike Lanigan, is a big operation which is very, very good at attracting big brands for sponsorship and retaning them, and that means it’s well kitted out.
But when 2023 started, it was clear there would be growing pains for this team as it tried to get out of a performance trough that was dragging on.
Though its questionable street course performance was masked by strong drives by Graham Rahal and Lundgaard in the St Petersburg opener, it was then always going to be a big ask for new technical director Stefano Sordo to lead a team on ovals when he hadn’t worked on them before, and to help a team that got so lost on them at times in 2022.
So Texas Motor Speedway was poor – as it was in 2022, pre-Sordo – and the Indy 500 went the same way. RLL matched times it had set when it won with Takuma Sato in 2020, but the other teams have taken big strides since then, so it propped up the order and Graham Rahal failed to even qualify.
All this, coupled with Lundgaard’s admission that he probably wouldn’t have been on pole this weekend in Toronto had it not rained, might make you question whether the win is a false dawn.
But you’d be wrong to judge that too quickly.
Of course, the 500 was extremely painful for Bobby Rahal himself, who has both seen and experienced almost everything racing can throw at him, but is also impacted more heavily by adversity than he ever has been before.
“I’m 70 years old, and the Month of May took a real toll on me,” he admitted after the Toronto win.
“I wasn’t sleeping well at night. We’re here to win. We’re not here to fricking play around or to be part of it. We’re here to win.
“I’m telling you, it was bad. So much so that I thought my physical health… a year ago in June I had open heart surgery.
“This May, I mean, it knocked me back a few steps because I’m not here just to show up. I’m here to win.
“All the effort this young man [Lundgaard] and Graham and Jack [Harvey] and our team, everybody is working their butt off, and it haunted me. It pained me.
“That’s why I just said right after Indy, I said, we’re going to create and instil and initiate the ‘Indy recovery plan’, which we’re in the process of doing, which is all about looking into why we performed so poorly and fixing those issues so that next May we’re fighting for the pole, and that’s our goal.”
The ‘Indy Recovery Plan’ as Rahal called it, involved a team reshuffle with mechanics and engineers – the majority of which were on Rahal and Harvey’s cars – either swapping cars or heading to Rahal’s IMSA SportsCar operation instead. But it also involved letting a certain number of staff members go, which is another thing that has clearly taken a toll on Bobby.
He admits that it wasn’t even Indy that was the worst part of the season, it was Detroit one round later. Rahal won both races there in 2017 but struggled awfully at the relocated event this year.
In the races since then, Lundgaard’s been seventh, fourth and first, with Graham Rahal 11th, seventh and ninth.
Lundgaard especially has been phenomenal in this period. He has scored a pole before and run at the front but not looked as convincing as in Toronto, where he aced every restart.
Even when he was mired back in the pack on a different strategy he kept focus, delivered faster lap times than leader Scott McLaughlin was doing in clean air and cycled back to the front.
He had to do the same later in the race passing runaway championship leader Alex Palou for what was the net lead out of the drivers who could make it to the end on fuel.
The team’s average finish across three cars is actually worse through 10 races than it was last year, with Lundgaard dragging the 2023 average up with his personal 9.9 average helped by this win.
His road course form especially puts him fourth in the series’ rankings despite the four top teams (Ganassi, Penske, McLaren and Andretti) fielding 13 cars between them.
With such a messy silly season ongoing (trips into the paddock regularly feature one driver being linked with four different teams for 2024) at least Rahal knows that it has the right driver leading it as Lundgaard is safely under contract.
Jack Harvey may be the only question mark for RLL, but speaking to Bobby and the team it’s clear they like Harvey a lot. Harvey’s season – his last on his current deal – hasn’t come together with an average finish of 20th, down from 16.67 last year.
The team has tested Indy Lights champion Linus Lundqvist, ex-Red Bull junior Juri Vips, Indy NXT driver Toby Sowery and is known to be keen on current McLaren driver Felix Rosenqvist, so there are plenty of options, but despite the results, it feels like the team isn’t quite ready to give up on Harvey just yet.
What it must do is make sure it has someone consistent and someone who can buy into the atmosphere of the team being bigger than any one driver, which is certainly what Harvey has done.
Graham Rahal is the son of a team co-owner but he’s also a very competent racer who can bring a level of consistency rarely seen in many other teams in the series. His front row start at Mid-Ohio reminded people what he is capable of.
And Lundgaard is two months shy of being the youngest driver in the series but is one of its best racers and highest achievers relative to his equipment.
“He is one of the cleanest guys to race against,” said Colton Herta after finishing third in Toronto.
“He rarely makes a mistake and runs into you. I have enjoyed racing with him. He has been great. Obviously a fast driver.”
So in Lundgaard, Rahal has a driver emerging as one of the best in the series to lead it forward.
While RLL fans might need to brace for a bit of inconsistency in the remainder of 2023, this off-season at least has the opportunity to give the team a much cleaner start to 2024.
In 2021 the team had the best average finish across its three cars in the entire series, but then it went full-time with the third car and added Harvey and Lundgaard as Sato departed, so there was plenty of change.
Last off-season the team moved into the new workshop, took on Sordo among other engineering and mechanic hires and also initiated the BMW LMDh programme at the track.
All of this rapid expansion has the capacity to spread a team thin and even moving to a new shop often throws up issues of consistency, making sure parts for example are created the same as others and without issue.
At the end of this season, the only major change should be the addition of more engineers and the possibility Rahal and Lundgaard get a new team-mate. Other than that, it should be full-steam ahead.
This is not the time to consider RLL the finished article.
It’s a time you can celebrate a better period after Indy took its toll on real people, many of whom make up a really nice group as a team in the paddock. Ben Siegel is one of them, Lundgaard’s engineer who joined RLL for 2022 in his first lead engineering role, and hasn’t gotten the credit even as he scores his first win alongside Lundgaard also this weekend, such is the nature of motorsport.
There’s still much work to do as the fact the average finish of the team is currently lower than last year, which was already considered a poor year and didn’t have a win to boost it.
Most of the pieces are there for Rahal, it has the sponsors, the new factory, talented drivers and perhaps its only shortcoming is on the engineering and mechanic side where more bodies would help compete with the super-stocked teams at McLaren especially. This is a problem much of the IndyCar midfield is facing.
The Indy road course is coming up soon. The team finished second there with Lundgaard last year and he took his first pole there earlier this season. Last year he had a top five at finale venue Laguna Seca and Rahal scored top 10s at Gateway and Portland, so there’s plenty of potential to continue this form and regularly fight for the top 10 in the remaining rounds.
What is clear is that Lundgaard is on the cusp of going from underrated sophomore to up there with the series’ best drivers. RLL found him and brought him to the States and has loved having him in its car ever since.
That’s another example of how it can find talent and stock its team in the right way.
It needs to do that more consistently now and continue to arrange the jigsaw that could form the most delightful puzzle if none of the key pieces fall down the back of the sofa.