For the next eleven Wednesdays, we will look back on how each team faired in 2014 Verizon IndyCar Series season starting with the bottom of the championship, working our way to the top.
We start with Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing. The team began 2014 with a gust of wind behind their sails, landing the National Guard sponsorship and over $12 million in funding for the #15 Honda driven by Graham Rahal. RLLR looked to be a taking step in the right direction with the National Guard deal and landing two of the best engineers from Dale Coyne Racing in Bill Pappas and John Dick. Expanding to two cars seemed very possible as Oriol Servià secured four of the first five races with hopes of expanding his role in the #16 Honda. However, 2014 proved to go very little in the direction RLLR had planned it.
Graham Rahal
The first day of the season was promising for Rahal. Ninth in the first practice and second in the second was a great start but when the rains came on Saturday, it was just the first sign that 2014 would be like going upstream without a paddle for the Ohio-based team. By causing a red flag in the first round, Rahal lost his best two lap times, relegating him to the last row on the grid for the race and fighting the first of many uphill battles in 2014. He would manage to pick up seven positions from twenty-first on the grid for a fourteenth place finish, a norm for him throughout the season.
Rahal ended with an average finish of 15th in 2014 with top tens being a rare occurrence for the 25-year old. He limbed into the practice for Indianapolis 500 with his best finish being a thirteenth at Long Beach, his best start being twelfth at the Grand Prix of Indianapolis which ended prematurely due to an accident on a restart with Juan Pablo Montoya.
When practice for the "500" began, Rahal was never faster than 20th in any of the sessions while his teammate Servià was quicker than him on four of six days and ended up out qualifying Rahal by starting on the outside of row six and Rahal ended up in the middle of row seven. While the man to Rahal's inside on the grid would go on to win the Indianapolis 500, Rahal would be the first man to retire from the 98th running of the race after 44 laps because of an electrical issue.
Heading into June, Rahal sat 24th in the championship, nine points behind Servià who missed St. Petersburg and was out of ride and a point behind Kurt Busch who had just completed his first (and maybe only) IndyCar race. At Belle Isle, Rahal was in the top ten in each session leading up to race one and picked up his first top ten start of the season in ninth. He and his team worked pit strategy into their favor, led 10 laps on the day and were challenging Will Power for the victory, only to fall 0.331 seconds short, the second closest finish in 2014. The momentum from that podium would be squashed almost immediately in race two as Rahal was caught up in the first lap incident that Power caused after getting into Josef Newgarden, leaving Rahal and Justin Wilson as collateral damage. Rahal would finish 21st and complete only 43 laps.
The state of Texas wasn't anymore kind to Rahal. A twelfth place finish after starting twenty-first at Texas, followed by what could have been a podium, if not a race win at Houston 1, only for a lapse of judgement coming to the final restart cost not only Rahal but Tony Kanaan. In race two he could not take advantage of a fourth place starting position and finished 16th. He caused the only caution at Pocono after tapping the wall exiting turn two, finishing 19th.
He benefited from taking tires prior to the final restart at Iowa to finish seventh and picked up a sixth place finish in Toronto 1 but his gearbox let him down in Toronto 2. He made his 125th career start at his home track, Mid-Ohio and gave the his fellow Ohioans a great showing, starting seventh, running in the top ten all day and finishing fifth. He started and finished fourteenth at Milwaukee but had a promising day at Sonoma. Like Belle Isle 1, he worked strategy to his favor and appeared to have a shot of victory if he could save enough fuel. Unfortunately, he fell three laps shy and had a pit lane violation exiting drop him to 20th, despite leading 18 laps on the day.
He started tenth in the season finale at Fontana but faded to nineteenth, five laps down.
Graham Rahal's 2014 Statistics
Championship Positions: 19th (345 points)
Wins: 0
Podiums: 1
Top Fives: 2
Top Tens: 4
Laps Led: 37
Poles: 0
Fast Sixes: 0
Fast Twelves: 3
Average Start: 14.352 (18th in IndyCar)
Average Finish: 15 (20th)
Having regressed each season since 2010, when he finished 9th in the championship, 2014 can only go down as another head scratching year for Rahal. The glorious National Guard funding is now gone as they have pulled all funding from motorsports and he and his father's team are back at square one. In the eight races Rahal had a teammate, he was out qualified on four occasions while Toronto 2 was set by entrant points. Servià finished seventh at Long Beach and was leading the Grand Prix of Indianapolis late before needing to stop for fuel. He finished eleventh in the "500," the team's best finish at Indianapolis since Bertrand Baguette finished seventh in 2011. Luca Filippi ran at Houston and Toronto and despite averaging a 7.666 starting position in those four races, the Italian's retired from two races with his best finish being fifteenth.
While some are writing Rahal off as another next generation let down, let's remember he is 25 years old and will only be 26 when the 2015 season gets underway. To compare him to some of his counterparts, when Ryan Hunter-Reay turned 26 years old, he had been out of racing for a year, having been unemployed the entire 2006 season outside of a few Grand-Am races. He had only two IndyCar victories to his name and his best championship finish was ninth. When Will Power turned 26, he was still over a month away from his first IndyCar victory and his best championship finish was sixth.
While teenage competitors are becoming normal in motorsports around the world, championship success comes more often when drivers are closer to 30. In IndyCar, only 16 times has the champion been younger than 28 years old. Since reunification, the only time the champion under the age of 30 was Scott Dixon in 2008 and he was 28 years old.
If Rahal ever wins another race, he will break Johnny Rutherford's record for most starts between victories (Rahal has made 113 starts since his victory at St. Petersburg, the record is 97). There is plenty of time left for Rahal to turn his career around but he will have to get the funding to keep his career going for the near future first.
I hate to think that all of RLLR's struggle have coincided with the passing of long time team executive Scott Roembke. The team made a successful comeback to IndyCar in 2012 with Takuma Sato. Despite finishing fourteenth in the championship, Sato had two podiums while coming close at victories at Long Beach, Indianapolis, Baltimore and Fontana and the team appeared ready to take the next step and return to their status of an elite team. Roembke passed away just five days prior to the 2012 season finale and ever since then, full-time RLLR teams have only managed 18th, 19th and 19th in the championship with three podiums combined and are still looking for a victory. The major additions in 2014, Pappas and Dick are gone as is Mitch Davis as the once-Indianapolis 500 winning team can only go up after finishing in the cellar in 2015.
Covering All Motorsports. From Indianapolis to Le Mans, Daytona to Monaco.
