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IN THE COCKPIT: Graham Rahal, St. Pete
Service Central Chip Ganassi Racing's Graham Rahal files his St. Pete race column, and has a much different take on two-wide restarts than most of his rivals.
Graham Rahal  |  Posted April 01, 2011   Indianapolis, IN
Graham Rahal was fast at St. Pete, but an early hit from behind limited his overall result. (Marshall Pruett)
Ganassi Racing.com

Hi SPEED.com! After a long winter of making deals and putting together our No. 38 Service Central Chip Ganassi Racing program together, it was a real relief to get down to St. Petersburg and go racing.

We felt really good headed into the event, and I think everybody was very happy with the way that we had approached the race. We knew it was going to be a long shot for us to win the race, and even a long shot for us to be in the top six in qualifying, so we were pretty pleased to qualify 12th.

Well, somewhat pleased. I was a little bit disappointed just due to the fact that in morning practice of qualifying morning we had a really good car and I felt just really strong about our chances to get into the top six, but it just didn't happen.

I had a good start to the race from the standpoint that I saw everything happening right next to me. Helio Castroneves was in the row right ahead of me but fell in next to me as we got close to Turn 1. Marco Andretti was right ahead of him. So I saw everything happening.

I went to go wide and certainly cars went flying over me and in front of me and, basically, I just got checked up and had to stop as it settled down. So while I should've gained six spots, I actually lost six places and ended up dead even at 12th.

We had cars in front of us that we we're definitely quicker than, and I started my passing doing that and went down the inside of Ana Beatriz and then, at the next corner and from what I could see in the video, she just missed her breaking point.

What most of you saw was me limping away with the rear wing missing and nothing telling you how we got to that point…and it's funny because you can actually see a nose imprint from Ana’s car on some of our suspension parts. So I just got flat out punted. It put me up in to the tires. It was very unfortunate because we felt like we had really good chances. And then we lost four laps fixing everything.

So I felt like overall we did a good job. Our strategy during the race was obviously just to focus on the racing. It wasn’t anything fancy or complicated. It was just racing the only car in front of us, which was Dixon on our lap. Basically, Scott’s team took a different approach than us. We decided to save a lot of fuel and pit early and hope for a lucky yellow and we never got it. So I ended up doing up the whole race saving 3 to 4/10 of a mile per gallon on everybody else.

It was a long day, to say the least, but it was good practice. For a group that had to do our first pit stop in competition and so many other ‘firsts,’ we learned a lot as a team that will help us as we move on to Round 2 at Barber Motorsports Park.

After we all got back, we had a great team meeting on Tuesday following the event. I feel really strongly about where our team’s headed. We’re definitely going to hit our stride. People who are maybe considering writing us off will hopefully understand the Service Central Chip Ganassi Racing team is a start up. We’ve got a lot to learn and a lot to build upon.

So, that was the St. Pete event from our team’s standpoint. Let’s talk about the major topic that came from the weekend: The start and double-file restarts.

You know what? I would say, based on what I’ve read from a lot of the IndyCar drivers who hate the double-file restarts, is that I’m feeling the complete opposite of those guys.

What happened on Sunday with all the wrecks was our fault. And nobody wants to take credit, or rather, the blame. It's a classic racing driver deal, where we'll try to blame somebody else; that's our character. Maybe not every one of us, but what I will say is that we can blame the rules or other things, but we’re the one in control of the cars.

Now, I do think we should tweak things. The speed of the restart needs to be brought up a little bit, and where we accelerate needs to be brought up a little bit earlier. But what happened there was a classic case of it being the first race of the year, and there's so much adrenaline going that everybody wants to be the hero on the first lap and the restarts.
Rahal raced clean at St. Pete, but even with some of his competitors having major lapses in good judgement, he says he wouldn't change the restart rules. (LAT)

And you know what? It just didn't work. That’s on us, not the series.

The IndyCar Drivers Association had a chain of e-mails going around earlier this week, and a lot of guys agreed with me, actually, just saying, “Hey, it's on us. We just tried too hard. We thought that we could go sliding up the inside...”

I saw it firsthand, sitting back there watching, you could see that it was clear as day that people were shooting up the inside. And the other thing that we had a problem with was drivers lagging back. I think there were a couple of cases where guys in the first three or four rows were lagging back just a little bit. And then they’d get a huge run on people and by the time they got to turn one, they’re going 30 miles an hour more than the guy in front of them.

That's got to go. Or that needs to be penalized. Because there's been a couple of cases where the first corner crashes have been almost inevitable because it’s like we have two sets of cars at two different speeds as they hit the braking zone.

I don't see that we're going to have the same issues it Barber. It's a faster turn one but it's also narrower, so I don’t think we’ll have a huge melee there. Brazil's going to be inviting, though... Long Beach will be inviting, although not as much as St. Pete. There's a couple of places where we could have some issues.

I think at the end of the day—and I'm probably the driver in the world that thinks this--but I'll bet you, of those first couple of restarts with all that action going on, if you asked anybody in the turn one grandstand there if it was exciting, they’d probably tell you it was amazing. Now, everybody in every other part of the course is probably sitting there thinking, “Oh, these are a bunch of rookies.” But even from where I was sitting, it was exciting.

Excitement or not, we just all need to have a little bit more respect for one another when those types of situations come up.

I think right now in the IndyCar world there’s so many reasons for our fans to be positive and to be excited. We had the best ratings that we've had since 2007. That says a lot really. Because even in ’08 with unification and we were on ABC, ESPN every race and we still didn't have that good of a rating. We're seeing growth firsthand; we're seeing sponsors come in, we’re seeing sponsors activate.

There aren’t too many sports right now that can say that. The one thing that we need to keep pushing as a series is the fact that we proved last weekend that while Dario still won the race and Will was still on pole, this is the most competitive form of racing in the world right now. The field is so close.

When a guy like Sebastien Bourdais is qualifying well outside the Firestone Fast 12, you know it's freaking competitive. Seb’s a great driver; he can wheel a car. It's just very tight right now, which is amazing.

St. Pete was my first race with Service Central Chip Ganassi Racing, and from that side of things, I’d say it was a big success. We had six of the top people from the company in attendance at St. Pete and they had a fantastic time there. It was a big event for Tire Kingdom, being that, really, Florida's Tire Kingdom country. I think it made everyone excited for what's to come here.

I think the future with Service Central in this sport looks really good and everybody's really excited about it. I think we're going to have a great year together.

~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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