Graham Rahal breaks ground on new sprawling business HQ in Zionsville

ZIONSVILLE -- When Graham Rahal first emailed the Zionsville City Council more than 40 months ago to begin laying the groundwork for a new headquarters for his Graham Rahal Brands business, the full-time IndyCar driver was envisioning a single 30,000-square-foot building that would house a six-person workforce.

Rahal was barely able to pay his credit card bills and make payroll.

Wednesday, the 34-year-old sat on a makeshift stage just west of his family’s pristine, state-of-the-art 120,000-square-foot Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing HQ, with a local construction magnate, town council president and big-time local lawyer to unveil a two-building campus on 11 acres that includes that 30,000-square-foot building (33,000 to be exact) – but merely augments an additional 112,000-square-foot complex that will together house Rahal’s nine brands and what will soon be a 100-plus person workforce.

As the four men stuck their ceremonial shovels in the manicured piles of dirt on stage, a low hum could be heard off in the distance from diggers and dirt trucks roaming about.

“A lot’s changed,” Rahal said with a chuckle that flashed his Hollywood smile. “This is long-range for me with a long-term view of what I’m going to do when racing is done, and ultimately, I feel like we have a very good foundation in Indianapolis and Zionsville. It’s a great place to live, and everyone’s been very supportive.

“I’m just really excited to see stuff come out of the earth and see where it goes.”

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This tribute to one of American racing’s most famous families began in 2017 when Rahal and his brother Jared began pursuing more seriously what had been a lifelong hobby of car restoration. When what’s now Graham Rahal Performance didn’t take off right away, the IndyCar driver turned a bit flustered, reaching out to one of the Rahal family’s longtime car dealership partners for advice.

"(He) said, ‘I think you could make $700,000, $800,000 a year doing this,’ to which I said, ‘No way in hell,’” Rahal remembers. “It was all a pipe dream and then COVID hits, and oh boy, I thought everything was going to get bad. And it was for a period of time.

"And then things took off.”

If all goes well, things will continue to exceed Rahal’s expectations. Dale Dillon, the founder of Dillon Construction Group – the company that will be managing the project for GRB – told supporters at the groundbreaking that finishing touches should be complete by the end of 2024, with employees able to move in by January 2025.

The completed project will house shop space for Rahal’s Ducati dealership and the workspace for Rahal Paint Protection – both with additional franchise locations in Cleveland. A significant portion of the first floor will be taken up by Graham Rahal Performance – a company that acquires and resells high-performance street cars, upgrades customers’ current cars and procures hard-to-find parts for others.

There will also be a new location of Westfield-favorite Rivet Coffee, a small-batch coffee bar and roastery that Rahal said his wife, Courtney, gets breakfast and where a year ago, he struck up an out-of-the-blue conversation with the manager while she was bussing tables to see if she was interested in expanding.

“I’m a coffee freak, so to have them on property will be a tremendous asset,” said Rahal, who someone in the audience joked about having five or more cups a day on the regular. “There’s a community and culture that we’re trying to build, between GRP, Ducati, Piaggio (his scooter sales arm) and all our groups, and coffee is an essential part of that. It’s very important part for us to have.”

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Perhaps even more important to the whole project, Rahal explained, is a staple of the second, smaller building that he at first thought was extraneous, but learned after his first presentation to the town council would be a make-or-break requirement: a bar and grill-style restaurant.

“(After I first mentioned it), the council members looked at me odd, and I thought, ‘Oh, that was a bad idea. They didn’t like that.’ But when I came back next time, they actually said, ‘That’s going to be a mandate. We need that,’” Rahal said. “This city, with all the growth, they need restaurants. Badly. Just go down Main Street – and I want that to stay as packed as it is – but a lot of times you’re going in (several restaurants), and the wait time is always forever.

“So we want to provide another area for all the folks to come and eat. We hope we can create the ultimate hangout vibe.”

That second building will also include a social club, where members will have 160 spots for gear heads to store their high-performance cars and bikes, along with a Rahal family racing museum and the floor space for GRB’s Piaggio sales. It will bring together businesses in Brownsburg and Zionsville that Rahal said Wednesday currently includes eight separate leases. The larger of the two spaces will also be the home base for the payroll, marketing, accounting and social media teams.

In the short-term, Rahal revealed he’s eyeing launching a racing team to participate in the Radical Cup series that serves as support action at some races on the current IndyCar calendar to give him a chance to dabble in the racing industry outside his own responsibilities in the cockpit at RLL. The ultimate goal, Rahal said, is to franchise out part of his businesses.

“I believe our service work is better than anyone else around. I genuinely believe that, and I believe in the things that we can build, that they’re very unique,” he said. “Yes, we don’t manufacture a lot of our stuff currently, but we’re starting to. And even right now, we have these cottage industries in Indy that nobody else has access to.”

Together, it all sounds like more than enough to keep one person busy without considering the rigorous schedule Rahal keeps to continue racing. But Rahal emphasized he’s not hanging up his helmet just yet.

Though his current contract runs out in less than three weeks, ending with the season-finale Sept. 10 at Laguna Seca, Rahal contended that “everything’s good” in terms of cementing a return to his No. 15 Honda ride as he works with teammate Christian Lundgaard and a driver yet-to-be-named to bring RLL back to being a more consistent front-runner on the heels of the Dane’s win earlier this year at Toronto that marked RLL’s first in nearly three years.

“I haven’t signed a deal, but we’ll get there with time,” he said. “There’s a lot of things to be discussed, but we’ll get there.”

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Graham Rahal breaks ground in Zionsville for hew business HQ