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IndyCar
IN THE COCKPIT: Graham Rahal: Barber
What's done is done, and I'm 20th in points and I've got a long way to go. Things can only go up from here.
Graham Rahal  |  Posted April 12, 2011   Indianapolis, IN
Graham Rahal had a trying race at Barber, but persevered to finish 18th after contact dropped him down the running order. (LAT)
Ganassi Racing.com


Well, that didn’t go as planned!

We had high hopes for our No. 38 Service Central car at Barber Motorsports Park, and showed a lot of promise, but like St. Pete, we didn’t get to the finish without contact.

The feelings after the race were somewhere between frustration and a sense of loss. We could have been running up front, but they don’t score the races on how well you could have run.

The turning point in the race came when I had contact with JR Hildebrand, and our chances slid downhill after that.

I put the blame on myself. I certainly did not know that JR was a lap down. If I had, I might have reacted differently and held off on trying to make the pass at Turn 5.

What's done is done, and I'm 20th in points and I've got a long way to go. Things can only go up from here.

As I mentioned in my last column, our Service Central Ganassi Racing team really is new from top to bottom. It’s not like I stepped into a program with mechanics and engineers who had worked closely for years, and I was the only new component being added. We’re all new as a unit. That made what my guys did to replace the bent toe link during the race at lightning speed even more impressive.

I would say the guys are doing a great job working together, and a great job overcoming a lot of adversity. We've thrown a lot of adversity at them in a very short period of time...

And we're going to really keep growing from this. We’ve got 15 races to go, which means 15 more races this season to really bond as a group. And then, obviously, we're going to come back and attack even harder next year. We're going to be contenders once we get all of our teething issues out of the way, and we made a lot of headway this weekend.

We threw some huge changes at the Service Central car and we turned that ship around quickly when we weren’t that fast right out of the box at Barber.
Rahal's Service Central mechanics replace the damaged steering arm on the No. 38. (LAT)

What I was most proud of, and I've told this to everyone on the No. 38 team, is that there was absolutely no complaining. People often want the reward but don't want to work for the reward.

And when you're telling guys that they've got to make two hours worth of changes in one hour and you don't hear a peep out of them, and all they do is get down to work, that says a lot about the character within the team.

Even after what happened in the race, there were a lot of smiles in the shop on Monday. I'm very proud of the guys for that because it’d be easy to get down and it’d be easy to complain but we’re still in the hunt.

We're still in the thick of it and we've got a long way to go, but when this thing is all said and done, we’re going to have a lot of fun and a lot of success together.

We had National Tire and Battery branding on the car at Barber, which fit perfectly with NTB being so big in Birmingham. And now we're headed off to the West Coast which is Big O Tires country, so that’s what we’ll have on the No. 38.

I think Long Beach will be a great event for us. We're going to have a lot of guests there, so we will be looking to get some good points and put on a great show for them

Even with the first two races not turning out as we’d hoped, we're feeling pretty good about ourselves. We've shown we have the speed and now we want to get rolling at Long Beach and start to turn things around.

~Graham

Graham Rahal grew up attending racetracks around the world with his father, 1986 Indianapolis 500 winner Bobby Rahal. He cut his teeth in karting and moved up the formula ranks. In 2008, a victory at St. Petersburg -- in his IndyCar Series debut -- made him the youngest winner in major open-wheel racing history.

For 2011, Rahal joins Service Central Chip Ganassi Racing as driver of the No. 38 Service Central Indy car alongside teammate Charlie Kimball in the No. 83 Novo Nordisk car for Novo Nordisk Chip Ganassi Racing, as the part of the off-season expansion for team owner Chip Ganassi with a second two-car team.

Learn more about Graham at ChipGanassiRacing.com, and follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/GrahamRahal.
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