INDIANAPOLIS — Since last weekend's Indianapolis 500 qualifying, the Rahal Letterman Lanigan team has been trying to figure out why — for the second year in a row — their three full-time cars are amongst the slowest on the grid.
While one-off entry Takuma Sato found speed good enough for a berth into the Fast 12, teammates Christian Lundgaard, Pietro Fittipaldi and Graham Rahal were left sweating the possibility of another RLL DNQ at the Indy 500.
"I think there's some — there's a clear fall-off in drag coefficient on our car that we can see in the data, and I'm not going to go into how we measure that, but we have some pretty smart guys that have come over and are new this year," Rahal said on Sunday after qualifying. "We just threw on some random uprights, and we tried to make it work, but we lost speed again. First run of the day 29.4. Just not great. Yeah, that's the way it goes."
Rahal went on to say that Sato's speed was an "anomaly," but after going back and looking at the data, Rahal said they couldn't pinpoint exactly what made Sato's car so much faster.
"I think it's going to take a lot more dissecting over the next couple of months," Rahal said. "I told the guys, frankly, next week, if we had the opportunity to take my car off the track on Sunday and Takuma's car, take them to the (wind) tunnel to understand what the differences would be a great thing."
However, Rahal doubts a wind tunnel test right after the race would be feasible.
"There's nothing that jumps out that says this car is going to be two-and-a-half miles an hour or three miles an hour faster because of this," Rahal said. "That's a lot of speed, just to be honest. That's a ton of drag. It's a lot of things that don't really line up."
The drivers of RLL say their cars are perfectly competitive when they switch to their race setups, but it is still frustrating for the team to have such poor showings in qualifying.
"I think the car is naturally faster in race trim than it is in qualifying trim," Christian Lundgaard said. "I think we're relatively competitive every practice session last week, but we weren't necessarily fast enough in qualifying."
Rahal agreed, saying, "I think our race cars seem to be fairly competitive speed-wise. I just think there's stuff going on in qualifying."
As frustrating as qualifying at the back of the grid for the biggest race of the year may be, Rahal, Lundgaard and Fittipaldi also must navigate the emotions of having slow qualifying speeds but competitive race speeds.
"It's hard to balance. There's no weak links anymore in this field," Rahal said. "Back in '08 and stuff like that, you knew 15 of those guys weren't going to win. That's not the case today. It's not as easy to start towards the back and just think, 'I'm going to motor by this one, this one, this one. By Lap 100, I'm going to be in 10th.' That's not an easy thing anymore, period."
The three full-time RLL cars now head to the 108th Indianapolis 500 with a chip on their shoulders and something to prove. While the team might not have had the best qualifying outing, they feel confident about their chances of a good finish on Sunday.
"I do believe that our race cars are better. I think Graham was able to show that. He was running well in traffic. I think he was the happiest of all four drivers in our team," Fittipaldi said.
