Sonsio GP Front row starter Graham Rahal has indicated the reason behind RLL’s pace at Indianapolis is a mystery.
Graham Rahal was on course to take a shock pole position before Alex Palou took the top spot in the closing seconds. Nonetheless, it was a great performance from the RLL team, with all three cars in the Fast Six.
Speaking in the post-qualifying press conference, the scale of the achievement was not lost on Graham Rahal, who confirmed the team hoped for a good result.
“It’s a huge day for us. Really happy for these two guys as well as everybody on our organization. It’s been a lot of hard work. I think coming into this weekend we expected to be good here, but I don’t think we unloaded necessarily in a great place this morning.
“I don’t know, we were just battling the rear of the cars. It’s cool, though, so it’s hard to tell conditions-wise as things change throughout the day. We battled hard today. I thought we made a lot of improvements.
RLL unsure of reasons behind Sonsio GP qualifying pace
Graham Rahal also said work would go on between the drivers and the team to understand why their cars worked so effectively at Indianapolis.
“There’s a lot of great feedback between all three of us to try to figure out the right steps forward as we went into qualifying.
“We were all just standing out there talking. 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. For Honda to do what they did and just so many cars, so competitive. I’m excited for tomorrow.
Despite the strong result, Rahal urged caution when asked on the possibility of beating Alex Palou in the race.
“Obviously, Alex, 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 would be nice to get over that hump and get a win for sure.
A unique qualifying strategy
RLL was one of the few cars to run red tyres during practice. Graham Rahal explained his contribution to the strategy, revealing issues that arose at the last race.
“We did practice because we had to, but we had a mechanical issue in practice at Barber, and I did the red tyre run, but the rear of the car was not right.
“So I really didn’t feel like I got a great feel for them going into qualifying at all, and then when we went into qualifying I think we were kind of arrogant to believe that in Practice 1 we were quite competitive. So we kind of thought, well, we’re going to get through.
“Then we ended up just missing it, and instead of doing red-red to advance, we ended up starting 20th. That’s the game that we play today. Look at the lap times in Q1. Everybody does the same lap time. It’s nothing.
“So coming into this weekend we all talked yesterday about, look, if we leave Practice 1 and we’re feeling good, okay, we won’t run reds, and we’ll just do red-red in qualifying. If we feel dominant, then we won’t do red-red in qualifying.
“We’ll do black-red. If we don’t leave Practice 1 feeling great, then we need to leave Practice 2 feeling great. That’s what we did.
“I think it was just nice strategically for something to actually play out right. I mean, that’s what I think is maybe most rewarding for all of us sitting up here. We thought long and hard this week about we’ve got to maximize qualifying.
“We’ve got to start at front because we do have pace, and we haven’t been doing it this year. I think it just feels good to see all of that methodology and all the thinking kind of
come together like this.”
