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.
