Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing’s Graham Rahal will make his 300th NTT INDYCAR SERIES start at the Bommarito Automotive Group 500 at the World Wide Technology Raceway on June 15.
During Tuesday’s INDYCAR content day, Rahal said six wins and 30-plus podiums are nothing to sneeze at, but he feels he could have done more during his career.
Speaking to Paddock Eye on Content Day, Rahal said that as a team they need to start building for the future and he feels that they have done by bringing in Devlin DeFrancesco and Louis Foster.
Rahal did say that it hurt when Hy-Vee decided to end their sponsorship of the team but he said that the company decided to go down a different route with the arrival of their new company CEO.
Well, I think we have to. We’re at the stage now where we obviously from a competitive nature kind of have to reset a little bit, too. But it was disappointing. It was hard to lose HyVee, for the sport to lose HyVee. It was no reflection of us. We obviously thought everything was looking really good there. But new CEO, change of mindset, that was tough.
To lose Christian was tough because I think we really felt that he was going to stay. I understand what happened in the end, but the reality was that I think RLL had given him a great opportunity to come over here. I think we thought that he would hang with us, and he didn’t.
The reality of the situation is that puts you into a reset a little bit when it comes to the future and where you head.
It’s great to see the 30 car secure for many years to come. I’m really hopeful that Louis is going to have a great rookie year and something that we can really build upon for him, as well.
The reality is I’ve been reminded several times today that I’m old, which I don’t think I am, but it’s come up a lot. The reality is that my future runway, as I’ve told you guys, is shorter than the past, so you need to start looking at where do we go from here.
I’m going to be here a while, don’t get me wrong, but still, from a team mindset, we need to start to build the future guys, future stars that you’re going to see in the RLL cars for many years to come. So let’s see what happens here.