How Rahal reacts to criticism: “It’s never going to be good enough”
- Archie O’Reilly
- 1 hour ago
- 4 min read
Every year, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course weekend seems to provide the Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing (RLL) team with their greatest opportunity.
So for veteran driver Graham Rahal, it serves as possibly the best chance to return to Victory Lane for the first time since 2017. Over the past decade, with Rahal now 37 years old, that win drought has become an increasing cause of criticism aimed at him.
“The reality is honestly I don’t think it matters what I do,” Rahal told DIVEBOMB in a Tuesday media call. “I’m always going to get those comments, because even after we started on the front row - started in the top three two out of five races this year - you go on social media, all you’re going to read is how ‘Graham can’t drive; he’s slow’.
“No matter what you do [as] a person [in] my shoes, it’s never going to be good enough. I’m okay with that because if I’ve been blessed with one thing, I’ve been blessed with a mindset and the ability to block out a lot of this stuff. I do know there are a lot of drivers that that’s not the case. They get wound up [when] they see a comment or whatever.”
Rahal has always had the expectation that comes with the fact that his father Bobby, now RLL team owner, was a three-time series champion and Indianapolis 500 winner in 1986. Back in that era, the scope for barrages of criticism aimed at drivers was much narrower.
Driving in the modern era, Rahal has had to grow accustomed to facing up to criticism, which is increasingly hard to avoid in the age of social media.
“The accessibility of the fan today is a blessing and a curse,” he said. “In my dad’s day, if they had a bad race, you weren’t going to hear anything about it because it was probably written in a newspaper and the reality was you weren’t ever going to see that newspaper.
“Today’s world is not that. Everybody has you at their fingertips. So you have to be able to mentally put all of that aside and stick to the plan, stick to the focus. And the reality is we’ve had a strong start to the year and we’ve been fast in a lot of places. We’ve had some great results. I believe this weekend is an opportunity for us. That’s all I’m focused on.”
It has been a tough few years for Rahal and the RLL team, feeding much of the elevated criticism, which has often gone as far as to suggest he should consider retirement. Since a seven-year run of finishing inside the top 10 of the IndyCar championship ended with 11th place in 2021, he has only regressed every year in the standings to 18th and 19th in the past two years.
But the start to 2026 has been markedly better, with three top-10 results - including a first podium since 2024 at Barber - already matching his tally from the entirety of last year. Through five rounds, he sits 10th in the standings too.
“We’re just in a better place,” he assessed. “We’ve got a lot more work to do, certainly, but there’s a lot of great things currently happening. There’s a lot of great people within the organisation and there’s a confidence that is starting to grow that we are a player.
“We’ve also been able to move some folks around internally in the team - guys that you maybe don’t see on the road that much anymore but putting them in great places that they can have success as well and then maybe they fit a little better.”
Beyond movements among the existing team behind the scenes, there were more off-season additions to the organisation, including Gavin Ward as team principal and, maybe chiefly, Brian Barnhart as senior vice president of operations. This adds to last year’s coup of Jay Frye, who has crucially now had an off-season in his role as team president.
“I can’t look past Brian Barnhart. I think singularly the best hire we’ve made in a long, long time has been that man,” Rahal asserted. “I’ve absolutely loved having him. He’s a racer at heart. And at the end of the day, do we want to look at AI and all this stuff? Sure. But this is racing. Racing, you’ve got to race the race - and Brian does that tremendously well.”
So after multiple years with a sense limbo and with much reshuffling behind the scenes, there is a sense that RLL have started to establish some crucial stability.
“We don’t need to make a lot of changes,” Rahal insisted. “We’ve got to keep building upon the consistency and what we’ve started. From there, just go and acquire and accumulate some other good folks.
“If we make RLL an attractive place where we can keep having the success from the beginning, the success that we’re having, more and more folks are going to want to come work here. There’s plenty of teams that don’t have the environment we have.
“If we can bring some of those guys on. As I tell dad all the time, I don’t think anybody here needs replaced. I really don’t. I just think we need more. We need to just continue to add and get more good people and get more information and data - and things will get better.”
For Rahal himself, no matter what the skeptics may say, he maintains firm belief that he is able to - and already has this year - still mix it with the best.
“Everybody within my team knows my capabilities. And more importantly, go ask Will Power, go ask Scott Dixon, go ask all those guys that race wheel-to-wheel [with me]... I would firmly believe that they would say very positive things about me.
“Those are the people and the opinions that matter. That’s all I really focus on.”
