How Jay Frye is leading RLL’s IndyCar team forward
- Archie O’Reilly
- 1 day ago
- 7 min read
Make s**t happen. Get s**t done.
The ethos that underpins everything Jay Frye strives for.
And in his new-for-2025 role as team president at Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing (RLL), that spirit - in its no uncertain terms - has swiftly spread through the organisation.
“Obviously whatever is at the top trickles down and Jay is very outspoken,” Louis Foster, 2025 IndyCar Rookie of the Year for RLL, told DIVEBOMB. “He speaks his mind - he’s not a bulls**tter. He’s a really really good guy. Jay and I get on very well and I respect him a lot.”
Frye came onboard at RLL at the beginning of April - one month into the IndyCar season - to lead the team’s IndyCar and IMSA SportsCar Championship operations, having been relieved of his duties as IndyCar president in early February.
The 60-year-old had previously held team management roles in NASCAR for MB2 Motorsports - a team which he built - from 1996 to 2007 and Red Bull Racing from 2008 until 2011. But after a stint with Hendrick Motorsports, he ventured into IndyCar in 2013.
His time with the series began as chief revenue officer at Hulman Motorsports, where he led the sponsorship sales, licensing and account services of IndyCar and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. From there, Frye transitioned to president of IndyCar’s competition and operations in 2015, which eventually led to his role as series president.
He spent six years in the all-encompassing presidential position and over a decade at IndyCar before being replaced by Doug Boles earlier this year. His legacy spanned the ensuring of financial stability for the series, the building of important partnerships, including with NTT DATA, and the implementing of critical safety advancements on-track.
With Frye on the market and RLL in search of a leader for the organisation, there was little time before the Illinois native was snapped up for a return to a familiar team leadership role. With Steve Eriksen departing as chief operating officer, a vacancy was left for a true figurehead to emerge at a team plagued by instability in recent times.
“The history of the team over the last three, four years, obviously I haven’t been hands-on with - I haven’t been here,” Foster admitted. “But from what I’ve been told and what I understand, it’s been pulled in a lot of different directions from different people over the years. And that’s why the only thing that’s been consistent, really, is Graham [Rahal].
“So to have Jay come in, Jay’s got some great experience in motorsport. The guy did NASCAR for many years, led IndyCar for a long time, knows everyone in the paddock, knows how to get the most out of people. He’s a great guy to have.”
There has been a lot of turnover in personnel at RLL across the past few seasons, with the team reaching numerous seeming dead-ends. Results have suffered as a result.
The downturn is best reflected by the results of Graham Rahal - one of the few consistent parts of an oft-changing team. After seven seasons inside the top 10 of the championship between 2015 and 2021 - peaking with fourth and fifth in the first two years of that period - Rahal has since regressed to 11th, 15th, 18th and now 19th in points.
Sophomore Christian Lundgaard’s eighth-place finish in 2023 and subsequent 11th in 2024 offered glimmers of potential. But after the Dane’s departure this year, 19th, 23rd and 26th for Rahal, Foster and Devlin DeFrancesco offered a stark reality check.
It is not all doom and gloom, though. While not necessarily reflected in results yet - Rahal’s three top-seven finishes being the only top-10 finishes among the full-time trio in 2025 - a footprint has started to emerge internally after Frye’s early-season addition.
Some foundations have been laid that may not yet be openly visible. Or on a more public front, you only have to look as far as last month’s announcement that Droplight has entered a multi-year agreement with the team as primary sponsor of Foster’s No.45 entry, having come onboard for the Indianapolis 500 in May - within two months of Frye’s tenure.
Also last month, there was global motorsport attention on the team as former Formula One driver Mick Schumacher, son of seven-time F1 champion Michael, tested with RLL on the road course at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
The first person to greet Schumacher ahead of a long weekend of preparation at RLL’s workshop? Frye. Central to the deal.
Should this blossom into an IndyCar future at RLL for Schumacher, which he appears to hold a genuine interest in, it would be a canny Frye-inspired move - both as a coup from a competition perspective and on a commercial front.
“Obviously [Frye] got signed to the team and everyone was like: ‘Wow, that’s super cool,’” Foster recalled. “And since then, it’s settled down, as you expect. There is so much stuff that’s happened internally in the team that’s all credit to Jay - genuinely all credit to Jay.
“He has definitely, by far, been the biggest impact on the team this year, without a doubt: the sponsors he’s brought, I think the whole Mick thing was mainly because of him. The guy is a demon of that kind of stuff so it’s great to have him onboard.”
Frye’s leadership extends into the intangibles too. His drive and work ethic provides an example and sets the tone for the rest of the team.
It has grown into a cliché in the sporting world, but Frye is the perfect case study of being ‘first one through the door; last one out’ on any given day. And even when he is not obligated to be at RLL’s Zionsville, Indiana headquarters, his relentlessness cannot keep him away.
“The guy works tirelessly - works on weekends usually as well,” Foster divulged. “I’ll drive past the shop on a Saturday and I’ll see his car parked outside. I’m like: ‘What is Jay doing here today? Go home, mate. Go chill out.’ He works so hard.
“I don’t think he’s got everyone into a room like: ‘From now on, you will get s**t [done].’ It’s not like that. It just trickles down from osmosis. He’s very motivated to improve.
“[Co-owners] Bobby [Rahal], Mike [Lanigan] and David [Letterman] are all very motivated to improve. New sponsors are onboard that are very much behind improving and getting the programme up to a place where we can start competing for wins and consistent podiums.”
The prospect of more internal change this off-season has been unavoidable. After all, this is the first non-in-season period Frye - a trusted frontman for the long-term - has had to make an even wider mark than within the breathlessness of the racing campaign.
But there is hope that the necessary impact can be made with fine-tuning, rather than the same instability-inducing wholesale restructuring that has been rife.
“The team hasn’t changed a tonne,” Foster detailed. “There’s been a little bit of restructuring recently - post-season stuff - and we’ve got new people coming in, some people leaving. As with any team, there’s always restructuring after a season.
“But definitely some of the more key roles are moving around a little bit and the way the team is being built is a little bit different. Not crazy - not enough to knock it all down and restart. That’s not what we’re doing. We’re just changing it around to make it all gel a little bit better.
“Your key people are all in the same place mainly, which is good for continuity - everyone knows what we did wrong this year so we know what to work towards next year. You bring a new guy and he hasn’t got a clue; he has to go read about it all but doesn’t really understand the extent of the issues.”
There is knowledge of where improvement is needed. A whole plethora of performance elements plagued the team across the past season: race-day pace, the repeated factor of oval performance, elements of strategy and general team-wide execution.
But there are also shoots of life, whether road course qualifying pace, which resulted in a pole for Foster at Road America, the promise of 22-year-old Foster’s Rookie of the Year crown, the Frye-fuelled partnerships or now Schumacher’s interest.
It is now a matter of how the team goes about eliminating that lingering low-hanging fruit which has provided a persistent stumbling block. But at the top, there is now restored trust in a vastly experienced leader to elevate untapped talent within the RLL ranks.
Because there is quality within the organisation. But quality largely unshown.
“The team is heading in a good direction,” Foster insisted. “Everyone’s going to say that about their team, because you’re not going to say the team’s going in a bad direction, but I genuinely do think that with Jay’s guidance and with some guidance from other places within the team, there is a good outlook on the future.
“There’s a lot of people there that have good ideas and good thoughts. Jay really is the person that’s gelled that all together. So I’m excited to see where the team goes and see what happens because I have faith in the guys there.
“We’ve got some very, very smart people. I just think they haven’t been given the tools to show that in previous years. We’re trying to let these super smart engineers or performance engineers or mechanics be able to show what they’ve got. And I think previously they’ve been a little bit stricken into their roles and suppressed.”
It will not be an immediate route back to the headier days of six successive race-winning years for the team from the mid-2010s through to the pandemic-impacted 2020 season, in which Takuma Sato reigned in the Indy 500.
But after years of uncertainty and a team embroiled in a decline, there is optimism that solutions to the slump are starting to be uncovered under Frye’s rule.
“I can blab on here for months about saying how good the team’s going to be,” Foster rallied. “At the end of the day, we need to prove it.
“There’s a lot of motivation there to turn it around. I wouldn’t even say it’s turning it around. It’s just continuing going on the direction that Jay put us on. Sometimes they’re right, sometimes they’re wrong, the direction that you put on.
“But I have a feeling with Jay that it’s probably right.”
