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IndyCar
RAHAL: Good Days And Bad Days
Being an IndyCar driver is one of, if not the greatest job on Earth, but it also has its ups and downs.
Graham Rahal  |  Posted August 13, 2010  
Mid-Ohio was one to forget for Graham Rahal and the Newman/Haas team. They hope to rebound at Sonoma next weekend. (LAT)
It might sound a bit crazy, but even IndyCar drivers have days on the job where you stare at the clock waiting for it to be over! Obviously, when you go home to your home race you are absolutely hoping for the best, and that’s what I did at Mid-Ohio last weekend, but if you watched the race, you know it was one to forget.

We’ve had success in ChampCar and the IZOD IndyCar Series; Newman/Haas has won everything imaginable, but that doesn’t mean we’re guaranteed anything just by showing up. Sometimes you have a humbling event like Mid-Ohio where you learn a lot about what to improve for the next race, so that was the main message we all took home with us.

Friday it started off as we would have hoped but, but even when we got done on Friday, I told the guys today that maybe it was a good thing, or maybe not, but the car certainly is not where we need it to be. I said we've got some work ahead even though we were fastest on the day.

That’s how a weekend goes sometimes. Even if you’re on pole, you rarely step out of the car totally pleased, or without a few setup changes to make the car even better. We only had a small gap on the field on Friday, but that would be the day we peaked, and unfortunately, we never improved.

To be honest, the car was worse Saturday than it was Friday and we came to find out after qualifying that there was a part in the drivetrain that had eaten itself alive which was causing quite a lot of our handling problems but, by then, it was too late to recover. And then we thought the NTB car was pretty good in morning warm-up but then in the race we just didn't have the pace. I bet I was five miles an hour slower than most everybody else on the straightaway, and that's quite a lot. My teammate Hideki, for instance, pulled me at least a couple of car lengths every straightaway. It was just unfortunate.

Except for Friday, we were fighting uphill battles, so that characterized how our race went. We’re working on a, let’s call it a ‘very efficient’ budget for the remainder of the season, so that means we have a few extra hurdles to overcome. 18 cars tested at Mid-Ohio the week before the race, giving them an advantage when practice started for the race. If I had to put our Friday pace in perspective, it would be safe to say that we were working on outright speed while most of the others were focusing on their race setups.

Unfortunately, the series is so competitive now that you can't afford to think you’ll just show up and be fine. It's not going to happen anymore. All the drivers that get to test have a huge advantage. That’s not a complaint; it just is what it is. It used to be a 10th of a second difference would separate each car. Now a 10th of a second can separate first to fifth, and sixth to 10th. So when you're talking about things being so close, those missing couple of 10ths are things you could have found testing. It's unfortunate that right now we don't have the ability to do that. 14 cars are testing at Sonoma this week and we’re not one of them, so we’ve got more battles ahead, that's for sure.



I don’t know what it’s like for you at your job, but when I have a bad day, I tend to take it home with me. My dad and I had this talk the other night; I expect more than anybody expects out of myself. Meaning, my expectation for the way I perform is higher than anybody could expect of me. And perhaps it's unfair to be that hard on myself, because, as I mentioned above, we have some obstacles in our path, but I'm not the type of person who would ever use that as an excuse for not being in a position to win. Now, my dad would tell you that for us to get a top 10 finish or qualify in the top 12, he says it’s a victory. To me, it's still a disappointment and it burns me up inside.

You can have all the reasons in the world for not succeeding, but none of them matter to me, and I think that it would be wrong if I felt otherwise. I think it would be wrong if I felt that I could tell all my friends or sponsors, hey, I don't really expect that much of myself and if I can just qualify this weekend I’ll be happy. Because that's just not me.

Winding down from Mid-Ohio has taken some time, but I went today and played some golf and I just told myself, okay, we’ve got to just move on. Obviously, I made a mistake in the race but now we need to move on and we need to make sure that we're in a position to contend next weekend, and the only way to do that is to forget about the past and be able to focus on what we have to do. And last year we weren’t the strongest at Sonoma but we weren't the worst. So we just need to focus on making what we had better.

On the lighter side, the Twitter argument we had with Ryan Briscoe seems to have started a trend. E.J. Viso was using his Twitter account to jab at Justin Wilson, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t tempted to fire off a few Tweets for fun, but thought it was best to leave that in the past.

It seems like there’s a new story every day about how one Cup driver badmouths another Cup driver, and that’s kind of normal there. I think that it spices things up for sure. But I also do think that open-wheel racing has always clearly been held to a higher standard. What I mean by that is we've been expected to act more professional, more buttoned up and more educated to appeal to a much higher demographic.

When guys like Briscoe or Viso get into little hissy fits people say it’s ridiculous, that this is supposed to be IndyCar racing; they’re not supposed to act like that. At the end of the day, we’re still people, we still have emotions and sometimes that's going to flare up. But lately, we’re seeing a lot of that, and a lot of on-track incidents that have caused people to lose their cool.

I guess I'm shocked at all the pushing and barking that went on because I think it's ridiculous. I like Briscoe; he’s a nice guy, but he's not building a good reputation by trying to shove guys. And I didn’t see the Viso thing; I don't know what happened or whose fault it was. But the thing is, people mistake Justin Wilson for being the kindest, nicest guy in the paddock but I wouldn't want to get in a fight with him.

Let's be honest, I don't understand why guys who are 5’3” are coming screaming at him. He’s like Shaq compared to them. There's no point to it. None. Maybe some of the verbal stuff is good for making headlines, but hitting each other or pushing someone – especially when Briscoe pushed Wilson when he’s trying to get out of the car -- doesn't have a place in IndyCar racing.

~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.

Rahal graduated from New Albany (Ohio) High School with a 3.8 GPA in 2007 despite missing more than 50 days of school his senior year because of racing. He likes to work on cars, restoring a 1964 Mini Cooper for his senior class project. Rahal is an avid Ohio State University football fan, and plays sports for fun. Though he trains for racing, guilty pleasures are ice cream and white chocolate mocha drinks.

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

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The opinions reflected herein are solely those of the above commentator and are not necessarily those of SPEED.com, FOX, NewsCorp, or SPEED
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