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This past Monday, we learned what had been long assumed was finally confirmed. Graham Rahal has signed a multi-year extension with Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing (RLLR). While it sounds like it should have been a given, I’m not sure it was as automatic as some think – and it shouldn’t have been.

While I may have taken a couple of shots at Rahal in the early days of this site, I have really come to respect Graham Rahal as a driver and a person. Rahal will be 35 before the season starts. If there was ever a time to make a career decision to strike out on his own, this would be it. He has driven for his father’s team since 2013. In that time RLLR has gone through some solid seasons and some that have bordered on the brink of disaster. You know he had to have some private moments when he wondered how his driving career would have turned out had he driven elsewhere.

He started out on his own, first driving for Newman/Haas and then Chip Ganassi Racing – two top names in the history of open-wheel racing. He had been with Newman/Haas for one year when the reunification of open-wheel racing took place prior to the 2008 season. The 17 year-old Rahal opened eyes by finishing fifth in the Champ Car championship, earning four podium finishes. After unification, Newman/Haas was not fully ready to compete with the new equipment for the 2008 season-opener at Homestead that season, so they sat it out. But when the second-race of the season rolled around at St. Petersburg, Rahal raised even more eyebrows by out-dueling Helio Castroneves and taking the checkered flag, wining the first IndyCar Series race he ever competed in.

The pressure was on at that point. Not only was he trying to emerge from the shadow of his famous father, he now had to prove that an 18 year-old winning in his first race was no fluke. Rahal did have trouble backing up that win. The closest he got to a second win that season was a pair of eighth-place finishes and he finished seventeenth in the championship

The following season (and final fulltime year with Newman/Haas) was a dramatic improvement. The 19 year-old finished seventh in the championship, scored two podiums and three more Top-Five finishes. 2010 was a year of transition for Rahal. He drove for four teams that season, including his father’s team in a one-off Indianapolis 500 appearance.

That year of transition was setting the stage for two largely disappointing years at Chip Ganassi Racing. For the first time ever, Ganassi expanded from two to four fulltime cars. But these were two separate programs. While the two Target cars of Scott Dixon and Dario Franchitti were based in Indianapolis, the two new cars driven by Rahal and Charlie Kimball were run out of a satellite shop in Brownsburg. While it appeared finishing ninth and tenth in the championship was an underperformance by Rahal, it would have been tough for any driver to succeed in what was clearly the Ganassi junior team. After two years of mediocre results, Rahal moved to RLLR in 2013 and has been there ever since.

Since then, Rahal has won five more races and scored twenty-two podiums. There have been brilliant drives, like when he swept the double-header at Belle Isle in 2017 and winning the wild race at Fontana in 2015. Then there have been the last two seasons, when Rahal finished eleventh in 2022 and fifteenth in 2023. Things reached a new low this past May, when Rahal was the only car bumped from the Indianapolis 500. He managed to start the race when Dreyer & Reinbold’s Stefan Wilson fractured his back in the final practice the very next day. But Rahal’s car wouldn’t fire to start the race, and he was left behind at the start. He ended up finishing twenty-second, ahead of just one car that was still running.

After such a frustrating 2023 season that saw the in-season dismissal of teammate Jack Harvey, but a win by teammate Christian Lundgaard – I think Rahal had three decisions to make regarding his driving career. He could retire after seventeen seasons in open-wheel racing, and step into fulltime management with his father’s team. He could also test his fortunes by going to another team late in his career, or he could sign a contract extension to close out his driving career at his father’s team. I think he made the right decision by choosing the latter.

An outsider might look at Rahal’s stat sheet over the years and conclude that he has had a disappointing career. I don’t think so. It has been an up and down career, but I don’t think that is all on him.

He was with Newman/Haas when co-owner Paul Newman passed away. After Newman’s death, the team became a shell of its former self and Rahal drove his final race for them on October 2, 2010 at Homestead, finishing tenth. The fabled team closed its doors for good at the end of the following season.

What sounded like a brilliant move at the time turned out not to be, when Rahal went with an expanded Chip Ganassi Racing. Not only were Rahal and Kimball miles away from the main shop, they did not receive the same attention or funding as the two Target cars. Rahal put in credible work, but the situation was not a good environment.

RLLR had just come out of a three-year sabbatical from fulltime racing in 2012, the year of Graham Rahal’s second season at Ganassi. Takuma Sato was their driver and despite almost winning the Indianapolis 500 that year, it was an up and down year that saw two podiums but a lot of finishes below twentieth-place. The time seemed right for Graham Rahal to come home and drive for his father’s team fulltime.

It’s been interesting to watch. To say his time at RLLR has been inconsistent is putting it mildly. He had his worst and best seasons in the span of two years, In 2014, Rahal finished nineteenth in points. The very next season, he had his best season to date, finishing fourth in the championship. His Indianapolis 500 career has been just as inconsistent. He finished thirty-third in 2008, whilke driving for Newman/Haas. He has had two third-place finishes, one in 2011 while driving for Ganassi and one in 2020 while with RLLR. It is worth noting that the year he finished third for RLLR is the year his teammate (Sato) won the race.

Things seemed to turn south for the team and for Rahal in the 2022 season. It should be noted that that was the year the team expanded to three fulltime cars, adding Jack Harvey to the mix and bringing in Christian Lundgaard to replace Sato. Whether the team was spread too thin, the chemistry wasn’t there or the engineering staff was deficient – it did not work.

The team’s performance on ovals became abysmal in the past two seasons, hence Rahal being bumped from the Indianapolis 500 by his own teammate (Harvey) this past May. Rahal himself had a solid history on ovals, but for the past two seasons, the best he could muster on an oval was ninth at Iowa in 2022.

Another factor that may make an outsider call Rahal’s career a disappointment was the hype after his win in his first outing at St. Petersburg in 2008. There was no place to go but down from there. Adding to the pressure was the press-manufactured second-generation rivalry between Marco Andretti and Graham Rahal – harkening back to the 1991-92 rivalry between their fathers, Michael Andretti and Bobby Rahal. Andretti won the 1991 championship over Rahal and Rahal returned the favor to Michael in 1992.

When the Marco/Graham rivalry never materialized, the two drivers unfairly caught the brunt of the blame in the media, when they never had anything to do with the hype in the beginning.

While I’m glad to have the Rahal name continue, that’s not that big a deal to me. Having Robby Unser or AJ Foyt IV trying to continue the legacy of those names meant nothing to me. I tend to base a driver’s career on their ability and their individual personality, more than their last name.

While I always thought Graham Rahal had the talent and ability, at first I was not a huge fan of his outside of the cockpit. He was very well-spoken and articulate as a teenager, but he didn’t mind letting everyone on social media know how privileged of a lifestyle he led. Before marrying Courtney Force (daughter of John), Rahal dated a series of beautiful – and I mean beautiful women; so that added quite a bit more envy to his already envious lifestyle.

But somewhere along the way, maturity kicked in. He became much more likeable away from the track and a better driver on it.

I will add this personal story, that many of you will probably remember. My cohort on the One Take Only videos, John McLallen, learned that his identical twin brother Frank had been diagnosed with cancer in April of 2016, and the prognosis was not good. While John had frequently attended the Indianapolis 500, Frank had not been since 1969. John asked me if I could locate tickets so that Frank could experience the 500 one more time. With it being the 100th Running and only a few weeks out, that was not going to be an easy task. I decided to put it out on Twitter, describing the circumstances, to see if anyone knew of any tickets available for purchase.

Within an hour, Graham Rahal saw my post, he messaged me and said he wanted to personally buy the tickets for my friend. He lived up to his word and provided excellent tickets for John, his twin brother and his gang in the Tower Terrace. Frank and John had the time of their life, and it was all possible because of Graham Rahal. Frank passed away about a year ago. John saw Graham at this year’s Music City Grand Prix and thanked him for what he had done for his brother in 2016. Graham remembered the whole thing, and expressed his condolences when John told him Frank had passed away.

When Graham Rahal’s driving career is over, and I look back on his career, the first thing that comes to my mind won’t be his six career IndyCar wins, his twenty-nine podiums or how he got bumped from the 2023 Indianapolis 500. Nor will it be that he won the first IndyCar Series race that he ever drover in, or that he dated women that were drop-dead gorgeous. It will be his random act of kindness he did for my friend and his brother. That made an impression on me and it will last forever.

Rahal’s career has taken some unexpected twists and turns, and has been through many ups and downs. It’s been interesting to watch him grow as a driver and a person. I’m glad Graham Rahal will still be on the IndyCar grid for a few more years. I’m hopeful that he can finally get that elusive Indianapolis 500 win, but if he doesn’t – he has had a very fulfilling career. The NTT Series is much better off with Graham Rahal on the grid.

George Phillips

This entry was posted on November 15, 2023 at 4:03 am and is filed under IndyCar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.