Juri Vips will remain with Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing for the 2024 IndyCar season, although how many races he will run remains an open question.

Team co-owner Bobby Rahal confirmed the news on Monday, saying that RLL has exercised its option to keep Vips with the team next year after he finished 18th and 24th in his only two IndyCar races this past season.

The 23-year-old Estonian driver drove the team’s #30 entry for the final two rounds of the 2023 season, and there was speculation that he would be announced as driver of that entry for next year.

Pietro Fittipaldi was announced as the full season driver instead, but Vips may still compete in a few races as RLL still tries to put together all the pieces needed to field a fourth car.

That process is not coming along as quickly as Bobby Rahal would like, but he is still hopeful that he will be able to field the fourth car for a few races to get Vips more seat time next season.

“Yeah, we exercised our option with Juri,” confirmed Rahal. “As I said before I don’t know when it was, several months ago. We see Juri as a long-term play as well.

“We’d like to run a fourth car. We’re not making as much progress on that as we would like. That’s certainly a hope. Maybe it’s only a selected number of races, maybe one, maybe it’s none. We’re not quite sure.

“There’s one thing we did know, is we wanted to keep Juri in our family. He did a great job for us in Portland and fab job in Laguna. It’s a shame chaos caught him at the start.

“All in all, very impressed with Juri. We certainly wanted to keep him within our organization.

“Certainly we’re not going to rush right into a fourth car for the reasons you mentioned. You’ve got to be prepared to do that, to do it correctly, to do it so that fourth car actually contributes going forward.

“I think we certainly saw some improvements last year. Obviously our poor performance in Indianapolis still is by far outweighing every other thing we did last year. I think we’re making progress on it already.

“The first thing, you’re right, we’ve got three [cars], and we’ve got three strong drivers in those cars. The first goal is to have them consistently run up front. We do that before we do anything else.

“But I do like the drivers that we have in terms of the entire lineup with Juri, obviously with Pietro [Fittipaldi], Graham [Rahal] and Christian [Lundgaard]. I think that’s a pretty strong driver lineup.

“Ganassi is running five cars. Andretti has run four cars. So people are doing it. We just have to make sure we’re in the position to do it and do it well.”

RLL fielded four cars for the first time for the 2023 Indy 500, bringing in Katherine Legge to drive the #44 entry.

Rahal said at the time that his team would only expand to four cars if it made sense to do so, and was adamant that the additional car did not play into the team’s poor performance at the historic race.

Even if he does not get much seat time next year, Vips will be working with the team to help them get a leg up on the competition as the series races with hybrid components for the first time.

Qualifying for the Grand Prix of Portland took place on Saturday afternoon, and it was Graham Rahal that took his second pole of the season around the short course.

The veteran completed his lap in 58.3195 seconds on the harder tires, which was a gamble that worked out as well as he could have hoped.

Scott McLaughlin set the second fastest time on the softer tires, just missing out on the top spot by 0.0330 seconds.

READ MORE: IndyCar Portland – Full Qualifying Report

Josef Newgarden looked to be able to challenge for the top stop, but pushed a bit too hard in the second round and ended up in the tire barriers outside of Turn 12.

The Grand Prix of Portland will take place on Sunday afternoon at 12:30 PM Pacific Time.

On Saturday afternoon, 27 drivers of the NTT IndyCar Series took to Portland International Raceway to set the best laps they could manage around the short course.

A diverse selection of drivers advanced to the Firestone Fast Six, and the pole was seemingly completely up for grabs when the final times were set.

It was a gamble on tire compounds that was the difference, however, as Graham Rahal streaked to the top of the timesheets on a fresh set of harder tires.

READ MORE: IndyCar Portland – Full Qualifying Results

Typically the softer alternate tires are the preferred compound for setting a single fast lap, but the RLL squad saw something in practice and left a fresh set of black tires for themselves for Rahal’s final run.

He was the only driver to attempt to use the harder tire at all in the final round, and it worked out quite well for him.

The pole is Rahal’s second of the season, and allows his team to continue a run of good results in recent months.

Scott McLaughlin set the second fastest time with a lap that was three hundredths of a second slower, and rued the fact that he ruined a set of tires on one of his fast lap attempts.

Colton Herta followed closely with a lap that earned him a spot on the second row.

The two remaining title contenders Scott Dixon and Alex Palou earned the fourth and fifth spots respectively. As long as Palou can stay close to Dixon on Sunday, he will be able to wrap up the championship a week early.

Rounding out the Fast Six was Pato O’Ward, who was the only representative from Arrow McLaren to make it to the final round.

Josef Newgarden looked like he would be able to advance to the final round and contend for the pole, but a small mistake ended his day early.

He pushed a bit too hard through the final corner in the second round, slid through the grass, and ended up colliding with the tire barriers. He will start from the 12th position.

His team-mate Will Power also missed out on the Fast Six, missing the cut by just over one tenth of a second.

After spending much of the season wishing he had better qualifying results, Callum Ilott put his Juncos Hollinger Racing Chevy onto the fourth row and gives himself an advantageous starting spot for Sunday.

Juri Vips, in his IndyCar debut, put the #30 RLL Honda in the 18th starting spot. The effort shows that he still has considerable skills after nearly a year away from racing.

Unfortunately, the driver with the next shortest tenure did not have such a good run. Tom Blomqvist struggled to hit his marks consistently in his second IndyCar qualifying, and put his car in the final starting spot.

Drivers will have a short warm-up session later on Saturday afternoon, before the race gets underway Sunday at 12:30 PM Pacific Time.

Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing announced on Monday that Juri Vips would be climbing behind the wheel of the #30 entry for the final two races of the IndyCar season.

The races will be the Estonian driver’s first in America, and will be the first time he has raced competitively in nearly a year. Although he has completed two test days with RLL during that time, the most recent being at Barber Motorsports park in March.

Vips advanced through the junior formulae in Europe, and drove for Hitech for two seasons in Formula 2, earning three race wins in that time.

He was also a part of the Red Bull Junior program, until he was quickly dropped following a highly-publicized use of a slur in an online gaming match.

The 23-year-old is looking to put that episode of his life behind him with the recent announcement, and is looking forward to trying his hand at IndyCar for the first time this upcoming weekend.

He will compete at Portland International Raceway this weekend and at Laguna Seca the following Sunday, and will also participate in an open test day held between those two events.

“I’m super happy to get the opportunity with Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing and very thankful to Bobby [Rahal], Mike [Lanigan] and everyone at the team,” said Vips. “I haven’t been driving all year so the anticipation for this opportunity has been immense but I’m really looking forward to starting again.

“We tested together at the end of 2022 in Sebring and it seemed like we just gelled. I got along with everyone and I really like the atmosphere at the team. Bobby’s also one to give second chances and I’m extremely grateful that he is giving me one and I really hope to bring a good result for him, Mike and the whole team.”

The #30 entry that Vips will be piloting was left vacant after RLL dropped Jack Harvey mid-season. Conor Daly filled in for the recent race at Gateway, and now Vips will get his shot.

The team is using these final races, and the open test a Laguna Seca before the event, to evaluate drivers for a potential 2024 race seat.

The fact that the team has chosen to run Vips for both of the final races lends weight to the possibility that he will be offered that vacancy, pending his performance in the next couple weekends.

RLL team owner Bobby Rahal was adamant that the young driver has learned from his mistakes, paid his dues, and is ready to rebuild his name via his on-track performance.

Vips will complete his first race weekend laps in IndyCar this Friday, with the opening practice session at Portland taking place at 3:00 PM Pacific Time.

Graham Rahal came ever so close to winning his first IndyCar race in over six years on Saturday, crossing the finish line at Indianapolis Motor Speedway less than half of a second behind Scott Dixon.

He was hampered in the race by tire choice, as his Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing team had to discard a set of Firestone tires after qualifying due to severe blistering.

Dixon did not have such troubles, and also had a spare unused set of the softer red-walled tires due to exiting the knockout qualifying session in the first round.

Additionally, the Ganassi veteran also benefitted from an early caution period that allowed him to run on the preferred tire compound for all but five laps of the race.

Rahal had to run two entire stints on the harder compound, totaling nearly half the race, and that was a big factor in why he was not able to close out the win.

“I was worried a little last night that we didn’t have three sets of reds to use,” said Rahal, referencing the softer tire compound. “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. I knew that the two middle stints on black [tires], I was going to have to drive the wheels off of it just to maintain my gap. We were able to do that and actually pull a little bit more of a gap.

“Again, Dixie, through that middle stint had reds, [the difference was] just blacks to reds. [I was] chasing down the best ever to do this, it’s not an easy thing.

“We got that last stint, and I knew we were going to have to make a lot of time. I could see [Dixon] wasn’t sliding around a lot. He used the tires only a little. Dixie is not going to just make a mistake. I knew it was going to have to be a flawless run.

“Frankly, I almost had it. Meaning I needed about one more car length to be closer out of [Turn] 13 to be able to get by. But I pulled off of overtake because I wasn’t really gaining. I was kind of just holding steady.

“For me, I thought Dixon used it right today. I tried to do the best I could to challenge him. I just ran out of steam. I mean, leading up to the last lap, I went through the snake – turn seven, eight, nine, ten – I had zero grip. I lost about half a second. That was it.

“At the end when I wanted to go chase Dixie. Having another set of reds I think would have flipped the script on this race, to be honest with you. But it is what it is.”

Even through Rahal didn’t win, he did earn his first podium finish since the race at Texas Motor Speedway in 2021, and gave himself a bit of redemption for his miserable Indy 500 performance earlier in the year.

IndyCar took to the familiar Indianapolis road course on Friday afternoon to set the grid for the final race of the year around the familiar course.

Clouds rolled in for the session and gusty winds threatened to disrupt the balance of the 27 cars on the track where margins are razor thin.

When the dust settled on the knockout qualifying session, it was Graham Rahal who put his #15 entry in the top spot.

READ MORE: IndyCar IMS road course – Full Qualifying Results

The pole is Rahal’s first in six years, and bookends one of the largest gaps between IndyCar poles in series history.

He completed his lap in 1:10.1132, and completes a redemption run of sorts after having a Month of May to forget, which saw him bumped out of the Indy 500 before finding a seat with Dreyer and Reinbold Racing.

Rahal’s team-mate Christian Lundgaard very nearly took the top spot for himself, but was forced to settle for second place as he missed out by just over a tenth of a second.

The second row was locked out by Arrow McLaren, with Alexander Rossi and Pato O’Ward taking the third and fourth grid slots respectively.

The third row was a team affair as well, with Andretti Autosport locking out the final two spots of the Fast Six.

Devlin DeFrancesco surprised the field with his pace and advanced to his first ever Fast Six round. Romain Grosjean was a hair slower on his final run, and locked in the sixth spot.

Alex Palou, the runaway points leader as the season nears its conclusion, was only able to manage the ninth qualifying spot.

The 2021 champion likely has nothing to worry about, however, and will earn his second championship as long as he doesn’t come across some horrendous luck in the final races of the season.

Scott McLaughlin was even lower on the boards, and was barely able to sneak into the second round of qualifying.

The skilled driver came into the weekend with a new approach to his car’s setup in order to attempt to an improvement on his pervious performances, but those did not appear to help him very much.

Overall, Team Penske had a qualifying to forget. McLaughlin was the only driver among the team to even advance to the second round, with Will Power and Josef Newgarden earning the 17th and 19th starting spots respectively.

It is an ominous sign for the team that has won more races than any other around the familiar road course.

There is one final warm-up session later in the day on Friday, and then it’s straight into the 85-lap race on Saturday afternoon.

The final visit of the year to IndyCar’s home track of Indianapolis Motor Speedway got underway on Friday with an early morning practice session.

After a time when virtually nobody on track, mostly due to not having enough allocated tires to use for the weekend, drivers put in as many laps as they were allowed.

With only one practice before qualifying, there was precious little time to get the car dialed in before the fastest laps of the weekend would be set.

Graham Rahal was the fastest of the morning, setting a lap around the familiar course in 1:09.8421.

Close behind in second was Felix Rosenqvist, as he completed his own lap less than a tenth of a second slower than the top time.

Christian Lundgaard was third, continuing his good record at the IMS road course and giving Rahal Letterman Lanigan two cars in the top three positions.

The team-mate theme continued with Alexander Rossi setting the fourth fastest time in his Arrow McLaren Chevy. The points leader Alex Palou rounded out the top five with his lap.

The session was relatively uneventful save for a number of lockups under braking. Firestone brought a slightly stiffer tire to the event this year, which could have contributed to the mistakes.

There was one stoppage during the 75-minute session, when Pato O’Ward spun out of turn 13 and needed assistance to get going again.

As a result of needing to be rescued from the manicured grass, O’Ward was forced to sit out for the next five minutes of the session.

Linus Lundqvist was impressive once again, finishing 13th in the opening run for his second ever IndyCar event. Marcus Armstrong was the quickest rookie with the 11th best time, and they both will be ones to watch throughout the remainder of the weekend.

A few of the series’ top drivers struggled to get a handle of the pace, including Colton Herta and Josef Newgarden.

Both drivers were outside of the top 20, and will have a lot to troubleshoot before they take to the track again in just two hours’ time.

The 27 drivers will take to the track next for knockout qualifying, which takes place at 12:30 PM Eastern Time.

Eight weeks after a disastrous Indianapolis 500 literally took a toll on his health, Bobby Rahal is seeing his team take big strides towards recovery as IndyCar enters the final stretch of the 2023 season.

His Rahal Letterman Lanigan team earned its first IndyCar win in over three years last weekend on the streets of Toronto, with his rising star of a driver Christian Lundgaard converting pole into his maiden victory in the series.

The result was something Rahal could hardly have imagined just a short while ago, and is the product of some drastic changes made behind the scenes to correct a troublesome trend in the team’s performance.

Striking a serious tone among his race win celebrations, Rahal described to media how hard it has been to make the necessary changes that have led to the team’s quick turnaround.

“Making changes is difficult because it’s obviously affecting people’s lives, and that’s not fun,” said the 70-year-old team owner.

“When everybody says, ‘Oh, it must be great to be a president of the company.’ Yeah, it’s great until the minute you have to let somebody go. Then you feel like crap, whether they deserved it or not.

“Just things weren’t working. I think that we felt we just had to — you know what they say about the definition of insanity is keep doing the same thing time and time again and expecting a different result.

“I just felt that we were at that point. 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.

“You know, again, it’s no fun making those kind of decisions. I mean, it’s no fun at all, but we have to. We’re a company. We represent great companies.

“We have great people within our team, and we have an obligation to those groups, to the people within our team, and to our sponsors. So you have to do what you have to do.”

The RLL team has been slowly expanding in recent years, and for the first time in its 30 year history has fielded three full time IndyCar entries for the last two seasons.

The team also began working out of a brand new shop this year, which houses the IndyCar and IMSA squads in the same facility.

Rahal and the rest of the team had hoped that investing in their resources would immediately give a boost their performance, but instead they found themselves struggling this year.

Often coming to the track with setups that were far from optimal, RLL attempted to find the source of the problem before the heart of the season approached.

A quick solution was not found, however, and Rahal watched on as his son Graham Rahal was bumped out of the Indy 500 by one of his own team-mates on qualifying day. That sequence delivered a big hit to the longtime owner’s pride.

“Well, after Indy, the month of May took — I’m 70 years old, and the month of May took a real toll on me. 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 had been — you know, 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 [Christian Lundgaard] and Graham [Rahal] 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 instill 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.

“I’ve got great people to help me do that: Steve Eriksen, Stefano Sordo, Ricardo Nault. May was hell for me. That’s why we made the decisions that we made, and they weren’t easy. I think we’re getting the results of those, but I don’t take any confidence that we’re there yet.”

Rahal confirmed that part of his ‘Indy Recovery Plan’ included letting some of his staff members go so that he could bring in some fresh perspectives.

He took those decisions very personally, and was very cognizant of the lives and families he was disrupting in order to make room for new people in the operation.

Nearly two months on, it seems as if that plan of attack is beginning to manifest itself with more consistent pace on track the past couple race weekends.

Christian Lundgaard earning pole and his first win in Toronto is just the most visible part of the team’s recovery, as there are many other pieces that are beginning to work better behind the scenes.

Rahal reiterated after the Toronto weekend how proud he is of the whole team for working through the changes, and that he expects more good things to come from their continued efforts.

“Detroit really — that bothered me more than Indy because we should have been — I mean, we won Detroit several years ago, the two races. We won that race. Then to go back there and be so out of it, that just really bothered me.

“I have to tell you it was emotional for me because of the hell that we went through in the last six weeks and to have a race like we had this weekend, and to see Graham going from 27th to ninth, I mean, Jesus.

“Yeah, I’m just very proud of the team, very proud of the working relationships we have within the team, whether it’s with Christian and Graham and Jack or the engineers or what have you.

“So, anyway, you have to make changes that you think are right, and thankfully we’ve had some good results since then, but we’ve got to keep doing what we’re doing. You just can’t rest on our laurels. We have to keep pushing.”

When Graham Rahal takes the green flag for the Indianapolis 500 on Sunday afternoon, he will be in a mostly unfamiliar car.

He has had a couple hours to get used to the Dreyer and Reinbold entry, along with its Chevrolet engine, but that is hardly enough time to feel fully at home in the cockpit.

The veteran has done his best to get up to speed in the few days he’s known which car he would be driving, including getting a new seat made and changing a few buttons on the steering wheel.

All the little items that could be addressed were completed quickly, and together they have helped Rahal feel comfortable despite him not knowing many details about his car.

“Everybody at Dreyer and Reinbold, and their partnership with Cusick Motorsports, everything so far has been really good,” said Rahal. “It is very weird, and they will tell you that.

“I certainly know as little about my car and the engine as I’ve ever know about anything I’ve driven in my entire life. But it’s a racecar, and ultimately you’re going to go out there tomorrow and try to get it better, and try to go perform on Sunday.

“I think they did a great job. The steering wheel had a couple suggestions – the wheel was never going to be identical to mine, but hey let’s put this button over here just to try to stop me from making an error.

“For instance, their pit lane speed button was where my radio button is. Well, I certainly don’t want to hit those inadvertently. We did a few things like that, but the seat fit went really well.

“I’ll thank the guys at RLL too. I know how hard this time is for them, but Josh [Junge] and Shawn Ford and those guys brought over right away my pedal faces, brought over my seat, gave them measurements for my steering wheel spacer, did a lot to make the transition a heck of a lot easier.

“I already felt comfortable [during the 15 minute shakedown on Thursday.] The only thing I can’t do is change the steering wheel. But we’ll make it work.”

Rahal will start from the very back of the field, a required setback that was brought on by Stefan Wilson’s injury and the necessary driver change in the #24 entry.

The 107th running on the Indianapolis 500 is still nearly a week away, but already this year’s event is proving to be one of the worst that Rahal Letterman Lanigan has ever had.

The team came away from qualifying weekend with one of their four entrants relegated out of the lineup, and then on Monday had another one crash heavily into the wall.

But even before the many Indy 500 on-track sessions got underway, RLL was in a tough spot. They have consistently struggled with setup and pace throughout the 2023 season, and have often been at a loss to explain the cause.

The team’s veteran driver Graham Rahal was quite vocal during his early season struggles, telling media multiple times that the team simply needs to do better if they plan to have competitive weekends.

Unfortunately, despite a brief resurgence at the GMR Grand Prix in early May when Christian Lundgaard took pole, the team has continued to struggle with pace.

The unthinkable happened during qualifying for the Indy 500, when one of the team’s drivers, Jack Harvey, bumped his team-mate Graham Rahal out of the race completely as time expired.

It was a gut punch, and was the first time RLL failed to qualify one of its cars since 2013.

“It’s hard to imagine it’s us in this position, but I could have told you at the [Indy 500] test in April that we’re in trouble,” Rahal said after missing the cut. “You [struggle at] that test and it’s too late, and it just came to a head today.

“I told you, [the car] was just really slow. It just sucks. It’s life. You’ve got to go through hurdles, bad ones of some sort. This is my turn.”

Team owner Bobby Rahal was bumped out of the Indy 500 himself once as a driver, failing to make the show in 1993 while driving for Rahal-Hogan Racing.

What the elder Rahal didn’t get that year was a second chance. But Graham was called up to fill in for an injured Stef Wilson in the Dreyer and Reinbold / Cusick Motorsports entry on Tuesday, just a couple days after he was bumped from the starting grid in his RLL car.

That opportunity came at the expense of even more trouble for RLL, as the crash that injured Wilson also involved the team’s fourth driver Katherine Legge and she hit the wall hard in the accident. She was uninjured, but the car suffered significant damage.

The primary #44 chassis was already barely competitive enough to make the show, qualifying in the 30th position, and now it will have to be rebuilt entirely in order to be ready for the race this upcoming weekend.

When asked if adding a fourth car to the team’s Indy 500 lineup has had any adverse effects on the team’s preparation, and ultimately pace at this year’s race, Bobby Rahal explained that the additional car is not a drain on their organization.

“Well, I don’t think we would have done this if we didn’t feel that a fourth car would contribute to the performance of the organization,” said Rahal.

“In years past, we’ve run three cars, and I would say the third car maybe really — when you run multi-car teams it’s very easy to — where one of the cars can become a drain on the organization rather than additive or contributory to the performance of the team.

“We knew we were going to run this fourth car a year ago. Hendrickson came to us, and they wanted to be in the 500 for this year, and that was last year when they made the commitment. So we’ve been spending a year preparing ourselves personnel-wise, equipment-wise.

“Do we want to run four cars in the future? You know, if the funding is correct. We have the equipment, so that’s not an issue. We have people, so that’s not an issue. I think we would.

“It would just depend what the situation would be. We certainly would not be less than three. But especially for this race, having a fourth car is I think a positive for sure.”

Of course, the team now only has three cars for the remainder of this year’s event. Having four entries may have put them in a better place than they would have been, but there was no hiding that they were still the worst-performing team in the build up to the Indy 500.

The moral victory of helping to arrange all the necessary sponsorships and agreements for their veteran driver to take over at a competing team shortly before the race does not erase the fact that he was available in the first place due to their poor performance a couple days before.

If the team was hoping that the Indy 500 was going to be the catalyst that helped them get back on track this season, they have to be doubly disappointed with how things are progressing so far.