RLL engineering team “more focused” in 2023, says Rahal

Sordo spoke to Motorsport.com during this offseason about wishing to apply his 22-year Formula 1 stint at teams including Red Bull and McLaren to the RLL setup, and Graham Rahal has confirmed that the Italian’s influence can already be felt.

RLL, which has moved into a new headquarters in Brownsburg, IN., struggled last year to make its presence felt on a regular basis across the IndyCar season, despite having a solid engineering braintrust. Graham Rahal was a model of consistency from 2015 to 2021, finishing inside the Top 10 in points every year, but last year he slipped to 11^th with just two top-five finishes. Rookie teammate Christian Lundgaard scored a podium but only one other top-five, although there was mid-season revival for the team in terms of pace, if not finishes.

Rahal told media on Wednesday, “I feel really good about where we're at. I was thinking about this exact kind of media conference last year, and I was pretty reserved in some of my comments about the outlook, and I was thinking about it this year, and I feel a lot more positive.

“I think Stefano has done a great job as he's come in, but I think also organizationally from the team perspective we seem to be in a much better place. Everybody is working towards achieving the same goals. The engineering side is more focused, I would say. Not that they weren't last year, but I would say more focused on the right things and not spending time doing things that aren't moving the program forward.”

Rahal has switched from Allen McDonald to Eddie Jones, with whom he won five races in three years 2015-’17 and that has, in his words, got him “fired up.” But Rahal is also confident that the whole team is going to move forward.

“I think what we needed most was pretty simple, and that's just direction,” he said. “I thought that from the top on down, we needed a clearer path, from the engineering corps in particular. We didn't have a technical director. We didn't really have somebody that was leading the charge. We didn't have enough depth. That's becoming clearer to us now that we know what McLaren is doing.

“With Stefano coming in… we were not even in the ballpark as far as depth and stuff like that. We've learned that now. We've been able to add. We've gotten ourselves into a really good spot.

“It's not like we've fired a bunch of engineers. Our guys are good. We've got good people. But we needed direction, and we needed somebody to kind of stand up and go, no, this is a – I'm not going to say what it is… But there was some testing we've done for a while that we've all been saying, ‘This is worthless, we're getting nothing out of it,’ but we kept getting told, ‘No, we've got to do it.’

Luckily Stefano comes in and says, ‘That's worthless! Why are you doing that?’ Thank goodness! Here's somebody who can back up what we've been saying for a long time. Now we can focus our energy. Engineers aren't doing all these crazy projects. It's just let's focus on what actually can move the needle.

“That's what Stefano really brought to the table. Kind of helped drive us a little bit better, so I'm really excited about that.”