Photo credit: Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing
If 2023 has been a long season for Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing, the last six weeks might have made it two long seasons. From bringing up the rear at Indianapolis—and Graham Rahal failing to qualify—the team has come around to take their first win in three years with Christian Lundgaard’s victory in Toronto.
After the race, team owner Bobby Rahal admitted that “the month of May took a real toll on me. I wasn’t sleeping well at night. 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.”
“That kind of shook us to our core I think, but I have to say I think, frankly, the race that maybe had a bigger negative affect was Detroit because we were just — we were not good at all. That’s when we decided to make the changes that we made internally. I think we’ve seen the results of that change.”
The team initiated what Rahal referred to as an Indy recovery plan: “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.”
This included some personnel changes, which Rahal didn’t go into much detail on but stated that “[we] needed to give some people some opportunities that they maybe had been wanting for a while and hadn’t been given that opportunity. I think that contributed to this turnaround of sorts. Just different atmosphere.”
The win at Toronto showed that things are moving in the right direction for RLL, and the goal is not to win one race, or just Indianapolis: “We need to have all three cars in the top 6, top 10 every single race. I don’t care what kind of track is it is. We get to that point, then I think we’ve done our job because then we’ll figure in every race. Right now we’re not there yet.”
