Bobby Rahal describes brutal physical toll of team's slump, firings: 'May was hell for me'
After finally enjoying a feel-good day at the racetrack, Bobby Rahal recounted how badly he felt during his team’s nosedive just two months earlier.
“May was hell for me,” Rahal said in an unusual sentiment for the 1986 Indy 500 winner who has won the Greatest Spectacle in Racing twice as a team owner. “That kind of shook us to our core.”
Christian Lundgaard’s first career victory Sunday in the Honda Indy Toronto ended a nearly three-year winless drought for Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing. The team’s previous trip to victory lane was Aug. 23, 2020 when Takuma Sato won the pandemic-delayed Indianapolis 500.
Indianapolis Motor Speedway became the site of an RLL low this season when Graham Rahal failed to qualify for the 107th Indy 500 (after being bumped by teammate Jack Harvey).
It took “ a real toll” on Rahal, who had trouble sleeping and worried about another setback to his physical health. Rahal, 70, had triple-bypass heart surgery 13 months ago after doctors diagnosed an undetected heart attack.
“We're here to win,” said Rahal, the co-owner of RLL with Michael Lanigan and David Letterman. “We're not here to fricking play around or to be part of it. We're here to win. It was so bad. It knocked me back a few steps because I’m not here just to show up. I’m here to win. All the effort this young man and Graham and Jack and our team, everybody is working their butt off, and it haunted me. It pained me.”
It somehow got worse in the next race. Lundgaard, Harvey and Rahal all started and finished outside the top 15 in the Detroit Grand Prix.
That kicked into overdrive what Rahal dubbed the “Indy Recovery Plan.”
“It was 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,” Rahal said. “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.”
Those decisions included some painful layoffs of some longtime employees at RLL. While it’s resulted in immediate performance gains – Lundgaard earned his third consecutive top 10 in Toronto, and Graham Rahal went from 27th to ninth -- the personnel moves still sting for Bobby Rahal.
“Making changes is difficult because it's obviously affecting people's lives, and that's not fun,” he said. “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, and then you feel like crap, whether they deserved it or not.
“Just things weren't just working. 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 a different atmosphere.
“It's no fun making those kind of decisions. 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.”
One of RLL’s most critical sponsors is HyVee, which made Lundgaard’s victory even more timely.
In addition to sponsoring Lundgaard’s No. 45 Dallara-Honda, the Iowa-based grocery store chain also is the title backer of the July 22-23 race weekend at Iowa Speedway that also will feature concerts by Carrie Underwood, Kenny Chesney, Zac Brown Band and Ed Sheeran.
During his Toronto postrace interview, Rahal joked his phone was “blowing up with people from Hy-Vee. Now they’re going to expect that next weekend!”
The team recently had an encouraging test at the 0.894-mile track, and Lundgaard believes the team could perform well there or in the other five remaining races this season.
“We're definitely making progress,” Lundgaard said. “The races that are coming up are races that we were competitive at last year, so I do think that we have a chance of at least getting another, if not three, two more wins this year.”
Rahal is looking at Team Penske, Chip Ganassi Racing and Arrow McLaren as the benchmark for results.
“Consistently they're up there in the top 10,” Rahal said. “That's what you have to be to win these races. Really, you have to be in the top six to get a legitimate shot. We're not there yet. We need to have all three cars in the top 6, top 10 every single race. I don't care what kind of track is it is.
“We get to that point, then I think we've done our job because then we'll figure in every race.”
