Photo credit: Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing
From the amount of times Graham Rahal said things like “it is what it is” and “that’s just the way it goes” after going from pole position to lead 36 laps but only finishing second at the Gallagher Grand Prix you might have thought Scott Dixon’s win was inevitable. “19 straight years with a win doesn’t happen by luck. There’s nobody else that’s anywhere close to that. But I certainly wanted one bad today[….]”
Ultimately, as happens so often, it came down to tires—and the tires that Rahal didn’t have to work with: “We had a blister on the left front qualifying set. Not really sure why. It wasn’t a flat spot or anything. Unfortunately it made it so that set wasn’t usable for us today.” This meant that Rahal was one of the only cars on primary tires while the rest of the field was on the faster alternates.
“I had a little bit more grip on the reds [alternate], but my rear was a lot more durable actually. It was kind of the opposite of what you would expect. I thought I could challenge the rear of the car much harder, especially on the entry to four. On blacks [primary], I was so, so loose in four the entire run that I never felt I could push that much.”
This cycled Dixon, who had spun on the first lap, to the lead after the last stop. “Because of his race pattern being so much more fuel saving, he had a lot more overtake at one stage. We were catching him at the end. He was starting to use overtake. At one point he had 60 seconds more than me. I think at the end we ended up equal. He was using it to stay ahead of me.”
The near-win was disappointing for Rahal and his team, but still gratifying. “[…]I thought if you looked at the average lap times in warm-up, we looked really good. I was thinking, it’s never a guarantee, but this is a track that’s fairly green, not a lot of cautions, which we didn’t get, and that starting where we started, if we did the right things, we had a damn good chance to win.”
