How RLL IndyCar produced “special” Indy GP qualifying

Archie O’Reilly
May 10
9 min read

Written by Archie O’Reilly

While Álex Palou shone out front to take pole position for the second successive race, another headline-grabbing story emerged in qualifying for the 2025 Grand Prix of Indianapolis.

That was a Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing (RLL) team in need of a result.

Their best starting position in the first four rounds of the season having been rookie Louis Foster’s 10th place at the Thermal Club and best race result Graham Rahal’s 11th that weekend, RLL headed to a track on which - regardless of the form card - they have excelled.

The team has had a car on the podium at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course in three of the last four visits, with Christian Lundgaard finishing fourth in the other in that run. They swept the poles across the two races at the track in 2023 with Lundgaard and Graham Rahal and have had a car on the front row in the last three visits.

Now, extend that front-row starting run to four.

Against the might of an IndyCar field ever-growing in its competitiveness, RLL was the team that stood out in Friday’s qualifying session. Nobody could match Palou, who headed each round and took pole by over 0.4 seconds. But it was RLL who were next-best.

Foster placed fifth in Group 1 of the opening segment to transfer, followed by his fellow RLL new recruit for 2025, Devlin DeFrancesco, finishing second in Group 2, with Rahal fourth. The second group appeared particularly challenging, with two Arrow McLaren cars and one each from Chip Ganassi Racing and Andretti Global missing the cut from that group

“This guy [DeFrancesco] in the engineering room before qualifying, he looked at Group 2…” Rahal said. “And he looks at me and goes: ‘Oh my God, are you seeing Group 2?’ What did I tell you?

“‘They put their pants on one leg at a time. Just focus on you and you will be just fine.’ Look at him. He can do it. He can do it.”

RLL continued to deliver in the Fast 12, convincingly progressing to the pole shootout with all three cars in the top four of the second segment. And when it mattered in the Fast Six Rahal and Foster matched their Fast 12 displays to qualify second and third, with DeFrancesco equalling his career-best qualifying in fifth.

“It’s a huge day for us,” Rahal said. “Really happy for everybody on our organisation. It’s been a lot of hard work. Coming into this weekend, we expected to be good here. But I don’t think we unloaded necessarily in a great place - we were just battling the rear of the cars.

“We battled hard today. We made a lot of improvements. There’s a lot of great feedback between all three of us to try to figure out the right steps forward. I wish we could understand what works here that we could take to everywhere else because it would certainly be nice to have this confidence going to any track.

“We’re not going to complain. Huge, huge, huge deal for us to have three cars in the top five. Massive. Obviously Álex, I don’t know what we have to do to beat him - I don’t know if anybody does. We’re going to give it our A-effort. If there’s one place I feel confident that we’ve run up front a lot, it’s here.”

It is Rahal’s best starting spot since his successive road course poles on the Indy road course and in Portland in late 2023. His best start last year was seventh at Barber.

The six-time race winner has not been to Victory Lane since Detroit in 2017.

“It would be nice to get over that hump and get a win for sure,” he said. “I think we’ll be very strong. If we can work as a team to get all of our tyres in the right zone, we should all have a strong day.”

For Foster, transferring to the Fast 12 marks a three-from-three record of making Round 2 on road courses in his rookie season. His best race result remains 16th at Long Beach but the reigning Indy NXT champion has now qualified third for only his fifth-ever IndyCar race.

“This is the first track I’ve come to in IndyCar that I’ve actually won in a junior category,” Foster said. “The previous rounds, two of them I had never raced at and the other two I had never won at.

“I know this track really well. Honestly, at the end of the day all the credit is to the Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing crew and the engineers - I think it’s clear today when we have all three of us in the Fast Six. I did my job but they definitely did their job as well.

“I’ve had pretty good qualifying results so far this year, but the races, there’s still more to get. Being a rookie in IndyCar is very difficult. We have a good understanding of what we're going to do [in the race]. Just need to get a good result.”

DeFrancesco’s fifth-place result levels his qualifying display from his last visit to the Indy road course - the second race at the track in 2023 - during his time with Andretti Global. He went all the way around the outside to take the lead at Turn 1 on that occasion before ultimately finishing the race a lap down.

“A lot of work has gone into this programme from the off-season to now, particularly on the No.30,” DeFrancesco said. “There was a lot of frustration leaving Barber because I think we had the potential to be up front. It just came down to execution.

“It’s good to see us making steady progress as a group. It’s going to take time. I feel very fortunate to be able to be here as things are transitioning in a good, positive direction.”

From the moment DeFrancesco joined the team, Rahal has been effusive in his praise of the young Canadian, who has returned to IndyCar after a season’s hiatus.

“[He] is a lot like my puppy running around and keeping it light,” Rahal said. “Both [DeFrancesco and Foster] have been very diligent in their work to understand what works, what doesn’t, how to be better.

“One of the very first things when we announced [DeFrancesco] last fall, he called me that day and said: ‘I need to work on my tyre saving. How do I do it?’ That work ethic has carried through with both of these guys. It’s great to see them have success.”

That sense of appreciation goes both ways.

“Everyone has really rallied around me in this organisation,” DeFrancesco said. “[Rahal] has played a huge part in me coming here and really has been a big advocate for me. I’m grateful to be able to give back to everyone on the No.30 that’s put in so much work.”

Heading into qualifying, Rahal had learned valuable lessons from a scruffy Barber weekend, where a mechanical issue in practice scuppered his alternate-tyre run and lured the team into a false sense of security. Rather than using two sets of the softer tyres to ensure they definitely made it to the Fast 12 on that occasion, they gambled on using a single set.

“When we went into qualifying [at Barber], I think we were kind of arrogant to believe that in Practice 1 we were quite competitive,” Rahal said. “So we thought we were going to get through, then we ended up just missing it. We ended up starting 20th.”

Despite one set of alternates fewer for the Indy GP, plus a new rule for the weekend that two sets must be used in the race, RLL revised their approach this time around. And where others saved the alternates, the team decided to use a set in practice. This paid off.

“Coming into this weekend, we all talked about if we leave Practice 1 and we’re feeling good, we won’t run reds [alternates] and we’ll just do red-red in qualifying,” Rahal said. “If we feel dominant, then we won’t do red-red in qualifying - we’ll do black [primary]-red.

“If we don’t leave Practice 1 feeling great, then we need to leave Practice 2 feeling great. That’s what we did. It was just nice strategically for something to actually play out right. That’s what is maybe most rewarding for all of us.

“We thought long and hard this week about we’ve got to maximise qualifying. We’ve got to start up front because we do have pace and we haven’t been doing it this year.”

An added layer of satisfaction for RLL is that this was the first major success under the guise of newly-appointed team president Jay Frye, with whom IndyCar parted ways earlier this year after his stint as series president, at the location of his former workplace.

Rahal was full of praise for the impact that Frye has had.

“I’m sure he feels good,” Rahal said. “Jay has already added an element to our team that was not present for a while - just leadership, that go-getter mentality. You all know his ‘MSH/GSD’ [make s**t happen/get s**t done] tag line that he goes by. We’ve lived it now.

“It’s been a lot of fun for me to work with Jay. We had a team meeting the other day - a pep talk from him. As long as I’ve been at RLL, we’ve never had somebody other than my dad [team owner Bobby Rahal] do that. And I’ve been here a long time. It was great to see

“The changes are going to happen. They’re going to take a little bit of time but this certainly feels good. It puts a huge smile on everybody’s face tonight. “It’s a special day for us.”

Even for rookie Foster, who joined the team before Frye’s appointment in March, there has been a clear impact since his arrival.

“Jay has been a very fundamental part of the organisation ever since he joined,” he said. “He’s a great addition to the team. This is a great start. We had a great 500 test as well as a group, bar Takuma [Sato]’s crash. I didn’t expect to be back up on this [press conference] podium this soon. It’s nice to be back.”

Frye’s impact is being felt across the organisation in a variety of departments. Rahal even likened him to an American football coach as Frye brings about cultural change.

“Jay sees from a logistical standpoint a lot of things right away that perhaps have been stated for the last few years but haven’t been seen internally from the top,” Rahal said. “Dad is not there every day, Mike is not there every day… having Jay there as a guy that unleashes and does what he needs to do, it’s going to create a lot of positive change.

“It’s been impressive to see him on the sponsorship task this week. I have always said our sponsorship team is solid; we’ve not had the results yet we have a lot of logos on our chest. We had a little bit of a hole for the 500. He was a man on a mission this week.

“It was very impressive to watch. That just shows his value and his connections, how he can help the marketing team and everybody else connect those dots. Those are the areas I think we’re going to see him most effective in the short-term.

“In the long-term… almost everybody loves Jay and so he’s a great recruiting tactic for us. This is like football in the sense that a lot of where people go is if it’s an attractive home; sometimes that’s about money and sometimes it’s about happiness and the whole picture.

“What Jay does is he’ll bring that to us. Culturally, we’re seeing a shift. That is going to continue to get better.”

In the immediate term this month, there is confidence that RLL can turn around their fortunes on the oval at IMS after two successive Indianapolis 500 campaigns with Rahal contesting Last Chance Qualifying, including failing to make the field in his No.15 Honda in 2023.

But headed by Takuma Sato topping the no-tow speed charts with a lap good enough for second overall, before crashing and requiring a rebuilt car, April’s Open Test was cause for genuine optimism that a much-needed turnaround is pending.

“Takuma was rapid,” Foster said. “From my first time on [the oval], we were quick, the No.45. Graham and Dev are both really quick and they both knew exactly where their time loss was. We figured some things out also in the race running later in the day.

“We’ve got a pretty strong car for the 500. When I walked in the driver’s room and [Rahal] was smiling cheek to cheek, I knew it was good.”

There is still a race to run before attention turns to the Indy 500. But qualifying with all three cars inside the top five for that race points to a promising trajectory.

“We have a great group of people,” Rahal said. “We have great mechanics. We have the engineering staff that worked their tails off tirelessly to get us to this position. The turnaround that we had in the off-season for Indy… we’re excited. We’re pumped up for this month and hopefully today is a sign of what’s to come in the next two weeks.”