At 66, Bobby Rahal has seen it all and pretty much done it all in a racing career that includes three CART Series championships and the 1986 Indianapolis 500 victory as a driver. He also won the 2004 Indianapolis 500 as a team owner when Buddy Rice drove to victory.
Rahal had good reason to get a little misty-eyed Saturday at Barber Motorsports Park when his two drivers swept the front row for Sunday’s Honda Indy Grand Prix of Alabama.
The last time team owner Bobby Rahal swept the front row of an NTT IndyCar Series race, his operation was known as Team Rahal, the series was known as the Indy Racing League and a phenomenon known as “Danica Mania” was the popular fad of the day.
It was 2005 at Chicagoland Speedway when Patrick won the pole as a rookie and her teammate, Buddy Rice, started on the outside of Row 1.
Fast forward to Saturday at Barber Motorsports Park and times have changed over the last 14 years.
Patrick is retired, Rice is helping to develop young race drivers, the team is now Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing and it’s the NTT IndyCar Series.
Saturday at Barber Motorsports Park, it was Takuma Sato of Japan scoring his first pole since Pocono in 2017. It was Sato’s eighth career pole. Teammate Graham Rahal was second to give RLL a sweep of the front row for Sunday’s Honda Indy Grand Prix of Alabama at Barber Motorsports Park.
“Obviously we work very hard every year to put ourselves in this position,” Rahal said. “We've been close before. A couple years ago, 2017, Graham was in the top six almost every road course. Last year was a bit of a struggle. Thank God Takuma won at Portland last year to kind of make our year.
“We work hard. This team works very hard to compete against the level of teams that we do, like Penske, Ganassi, Andretti obviously. Today is a fulfillment of that effort. Tomorrow is the day that counts. Now we have to finish the job.
“Historically we've had good races here. We have yet to start where we are. I think by all rights we should be competitive and in the hunt for the win tomorrow. Certainly, that's my expectation. We have a lot of work yet to do. It's not going to be easy. Penske didn't have a good qualifying session, but you can never count those guys out.
“Like Sebastien Bourdais said, if there's a lot of yellows, it may not matter how fast you are from the beginning. I think we hope for a good, safe race tomorrow without yellows. Hopefully, we can do a good enough job tomorrow to be back up there.”
Sato is determined to win the race. It would be a way to thank Rahal for his support and friendship in helping the driver from Tokyo continue as a competitive IndyCar driver.
“Bobby's determination never stops, and I knew that,” Sato said. “Obviously in 2012 (when Sato was with Rahal for the first time before rejoining the team last year). Since then, Graham has obviously done an absolutely amazing job in the road courses, a couple of years ago, a one-car team, always come back very, very strong. So, the team has been there. The team never showed the ultimate speed in qualifying.
“Like Bobby said, I think the engineers work so hard. Of course, everybody is working so hard in every team. We trying to find what was the actual problem because last year was a huge trouble.
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