Rahal has scored six IndyCar wins, all but one of which have come with the squad that his three-time Indy car champion father Bobby Rahal founded in 1991, and which Graham joined in 2013.
In terms of the championship, his best year was 2015 when, despite RLL being a single-car team, Rahal scored two wins and was consistent enough as a front-runner to finish fourth in the championship. Since then, he has added three more wins – although the last was in 2017 – but the team’s most recent victory was Takuma Sato’s triumph in the 2020 Indianapolis 500, and Rahal himself has stayed firmly in the top 10 end-of-year standings.
Meanwhile RLL has built a new raceshop in Zionsville, IN, and has become evermore firmly entrenched with BMW in sportscars. The team co-owned by Bobby Rahal, David Letterman and Mike Lanigan has run GT cars for the German marque since 2009, but next year will campaign two of BMW’s forthcoming LMDh Prototypes in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship’s top class.
“We've been very fortunate as an organization to see tremendous growth,” said Graham Rahal. “I think back so much to 2015. Yes, we had success, but we had no money, no sponsors, to where we are today, now expanding to three cars. We have our new building which is going to be a statement certainly to our focus and seriousness about going out and winning. I think it's been really, really good.”
Asked what point in his career he has reached, he replied: “I'm getting closer to the end, I think we all know that. In the position I'm at in my career now, I would say I'm definitely focused on winning more than ever before. I'm focused on being a good teammate.
“I'm also focused on helping build this team. It never really was my mindset that some day I would be a team owner. But the minute that building was built, I got a phone call from Mike and my dad. It was very clear that the expectation is that I'm going to assume that role with Pat Lanigan.
“I'm focused on how we get the team to the next level as well. There's a lot to think about, to go through. But definitely more of a senior role… I've got to kind of be the guy now to try to lead the charge a little bit.
“When you're younger you don't really think about those things, certainly when I was just focused on me, my car, my team. I'll be quite selfish when I say we really want the #15 car to be winning all the time. At the same time, it's important that we get this team headed on down the right path as I creep up in age here a little bit. Still young-ish, but…”
To this end, Rahal is positive that the team’s expansion to three full-time entries in 2022, with Jack Harvey and ex-Formula 2 driver Christian Lundgaard joining the squad, is a good one. Harvey has proven very swift and was unlucky to score only one IndyCar podium in his 46 races with the Meyer Shank Racing, while Lundgaard qualified fourth on his debut with the team last August.
Meanwhile Sato, after four straight years at RLL, has moved on to Dale Coyne Racing, while the team’s occasional third car – driven at times last year by not only Lundgaard but also Santino Ferrucci and Oliver Askew – has become a permanent addition to the team’s IndyCar campaign.
Questioned about his new teammates, Rahal said: “Christian is young, it's going to take him a while to understand what we do. It's going to be fast, but to understand the ins-and-outs of what we do is quite different than Europe. The tracks aren't all billiard-table smooth. I'm sure he's going to have some challenges in that regard as we go through the season. He's young, I think he has a long career ahead of him here.
“Jack has been around a while now. I think he's extremely capable. He's a great qualifier. As a team, we're going to make sure that he ends the races up front as well.
“I will say Jack has been great for me already from the standpoint that he is definitely way more involved than what I'm used to in Indianapolis. He's way more interested and has a lot more questions about what's going on at the shop, people and places and things.
“Not that Takuma didn't, but Takuma was definitely in a different place most of the time, being in Japan or wherever else. Jack being here, it gives us access to him and vice versa at all times. I do think that's really going to help push the program forward. I'm excited by that.”
On the subject of what he could learn from his teammates, Rahal said: “Every time we get a young guy in there, they all operate different. It's interesting to see how they operate and how they're successful, how they're fast, what they do. Even last year… Oliver was a guy who pored over the data. Santino, I don't know if he even looked at it! Takuma was, right? Everybody is different. But you learn from guys like that. You learn, ‘OK, this works for them’ and why.
“For me it's refreshing. Every guy that I'm around, you can adapt something from their style. So even like last year [on the Indy GP road course] with Christian, he was quick, qualified well. All of his time gain was on one part of the racetrack: he crushed Takuma and I there. But we had never seen somebody drive the track that way. It was a totally different style than what we had seen. Maybe that's because he had never driven there. I don't know, right? You have to learn from somebody like that.
“It's something that we can all take from each other this year. Certainly Jack has a lot of experience, of course, at Shank. The Andretti engineering [MSR has a technical alliance with Andretti Autosport]. To get some idea of what they're doing, what they do, how they prepare for qualifying versus a race setup and things like that.
“There's already been some interesting knowledge that has been gained. Those are all positives for us. We need to take every little bit we can and go from there. Same can be said for engineering staff. We’ve got young engineers and stuff, new guys, new faces, try to learn from them.”
