Takuma Sato has suggested that Rahal Letterman Lanigan needs to expand to a three-car team in order to take a competitive step forward in the NTT IndyCar Series.
The team is currently building a new state-of-the-art headquarters in Zionsville, Indiana which is set for completion in 2022 and will bring together both its IndyCar and IMSA teams under one roof.
RLL has toyed with the idea of running a permanent third car but has not done so since 2006.
Sato was previously part of a large team when he was one of four full-time entries with Andretti in 2017.
Sato enters his fourth season with RLL and has built up a solid relationship with team-mate Graham Rahal, but would like to see another driver join the team on a permanent basis.
“I’d love to have more team-mates, but that’s something that the team should make a decision on,” said the two-time Indy 500 winner.
“At the moment Graham and I working extremely close together to building the relationship and the consistency through the platform at Rahal become stronger and stronger.
“Hopefully we can continue this good job, but to be better, I think we need to expand for sure.”
“I think it’s beneficial to have multiple team-mates,” added the 44-year old.
“I’ve been going through the experience with Andretti Autosport as you may know.
“Of course the team-mates is always helping each other because we dividing the program for back-to-back. If you have two cars, if you have three cars, if you have five cars, with one session, you basically double the information.
“It is definitely valuable. But equally the quality control, the build spec, and I think to manage all the data and the engineers, all the things, also becomes more comprehensive as long as you have [a big] enough environment and resources to help solve this matter of the huge data.”
The 2021 IndyCar season is set to get underway at Barber Motorsports Park on April 18 – an event which Sato dominated in 2019.
