RLL has encouraging level of disappointment after Indy GP

It was a case of being so close yet so far for Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing on Saturday at the Sonsio Grand Prix.

Graham Rahal led more than half of the 85-lap race on Indy’s road course, which followed the team’s brilliant qualifying effort that had Rahal starting second, Louis Foster in third, and Devlin DeFrancesco in fifth. But collective adversity, along with a strange tire strategy plan for Rahal that no other team tried, left the team veteran sixth at the checkered flag with Foster trailing in 11th and DeFrancesco down in 17th.

Despite their disappointments, all three RLL drivers delivered their best results of the season.

“I’m genuinely proud of the effort,” Rahal said after becoming the first driver to pass eventual race winner Alex Palou for the lead of an IndyCar race in 2025. “I don’t think I locked up once. I don’t think I put one wheel wrong. I defended as best I could, but the Ganassi cars are in a league of their own. The grip they have, their ability to follow so close…

“We tried our best and I’m proud of the effort. I tried to drive as flawlessly as I could because I knew that was the only way to beat them, but unfortunately we weren’t able to do that today. We’ll keep working hard. We’ve made gains and we will continue to try to close the gap.”

Foster’s 11th also ranks as the best result of his young IndyCar career.
“It was a good race for us,” he said. “It’s nice to finally get some decent points on the board. We definitely had more potential today. Usually I would say I’m happy with 11th, but after qualifying third it’s definitely more disappointing. We’re going to go back over the race and try to understand the things we need to work on and why we just didn’t have the pace of the other cars. Aside from that, I’m happy to get 11th. It’s a good result for us. I’m looking forward to the rest of May.”

Stalling was DeFrancesco’s undoing.

“We had a really good first 40 laps; all the executing and speed was really good and for some reason when I dropped the clutch on the second pit stop the car stalled,” he said. “We need to look into that. and we had a bit of a slow plug in as well which hurts. We had such a competitive car this weekend and I’m frustrated for myself and for the team because we deserved more than that. We were pressuring Palou in the first stint. They all had to pit early because they were starting to drown, and we were solid. It hurts after being so strong this weekend. Our open test for the Indy 500 was quite good. Our race car was quite solid so we’ll execute the rest of May.”