By: Eric Smith
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Ten years ago, in January 2015, the Ohio State Buckeyes hoisted college football’s national championship trophy. Now, IndyCar is back in Ohio for one of their most iconic races on their schedule.
That same year, Ohio native and diehard Buckeyes’ fan Graham Rahal found victory lane at his home track, Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course. Fast forward to 2025. The Buckeyes are once again national champions.
Could Rahal’s decade-long winless streak at his home track come full circle at The Honda Indy 200 at Mid-Ohio Presented by the All-New 2026 Passport this Sunday?
“It would be a pretty sweet coincidence, wouldn’t it,” Rahal said.
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Rahal enters Sunday’s 90-lap showdown airing at 1 p.m. ET on FOX, the FOX Sports app and the INDYCAR Radio Network carrying a 135-race winless streak overall, stretching to Belle Isle Park in 2017.
A win at Mid-Ohio would mark a resurrection at a place that feels like home for the driver, for the team and for the legacy of the Rahal name.
The journey back to contention has been anything but linear.
Inside Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing (RLL), the last few years have been marked by upheaval. Turnover in leadership and engineering, evolving philosophies and underwhelming race day performances forced the team to re-evaluate everything.
Following a stretch of uneven performance, Piers Phillips exited as team president after the 2022 season. Stefano Sordo became technical director in October 2022 but departed after last year’s Indianapolis 500. Also during the 2022 offseason, Steve Eriksen brought experience from Honda Racing to replace Phillips but stepped down earlier this year amid further reorganization.
Enter Jay Frye, the former INDYCAR president who took the helm at RLL in April.
“I think a big plus, and this is no criticism of any – for example, Steve Eriksen. I thought Steve did a great job for us during his period of time with us,” said Bobby Rahal, co-owner of RLL. “But Jay Frye has brought an energy into the organization that I think we’ve needed, to be honest. And Jay is a racer. You can see that in how he works with people and how he does things.”
Alongside the leadership changes has come a technical course correction. Graham Rahal acknowledges the team is slowly unwinding decisions made over the last two years, from suspension setups to aerodynamic configurations. With limited testing opportunities series-wide, RLL has turned race weekends into research labs.
“There’s a lot of things on my test list that maybe ordinarily you wouldn’t try on a race weekend but are things that I have to — as the team leader that I have to test on Friday or Saturday morning to get a direction to go forward the rest of the races,” he said.
That forward movement is beginning to show, at least on Saturdays.
For the first time in his 19-year NTT INDYCAR SERIES career, Rahal has made three consecutive appearances in the Firestone Fast Six, the final round of the knockout qualifying format used to determine the starting lineup on road and street circuits.
He qualified second in the Sonsio Grand Prix on May 10, fifth in the Chevrolet Detroit Grand Prix presented by Lear on June 1 and sixth in the XPEL Grand Prix at Road America Presented by AMR.
Unfortunately, Saturday qualifying strength hasn’t translated into Sunday success. His race finishes of sixth, 20th and 20th, respectively, reveal the disconnect of what RLL is chasing, but Rahal and team officials believe they’re on the right trajectory to getting back to prominence.
“We used to be the Sunday team, and we struggled with qualifying,” Rahal said. “Obviously, now our qualifying pace is better, but we need to get our race pace back into the ballgame to where we can wear guys down in the race.”
The struggle on Sundays isn’t just Rahal’s to bear; it’s emblematic of a broader issue at RLL. The team’s last victory came in 2023, when Christian Lundgaard won on the streets of Toronto. Lundgaard has since moved to Arrow McLaren, replaced this season by rising star Louis Foster, the 2024 INDY NXT by Firestone champion.
Foster has shown flashes of promise. He qualified third in the Sonsio Grand Prix and earned the NTT P1 Award at Road America but finished 11th in both races. Like Rahal, Foster and third driver Devlin DeFrancesco, who’s also in his first season with the team, are chasing consistency on race day.
“I think with each race, everybody learns that little bit more and things become better,” Bobby Rahal said. “We’ve got the speed, now we’ve just got to put everything together come race day.”
For Graham Rahal, there would be no better place to put it all together than Mid-Ohio. It would be a meaningful triumph, not only ending a near-decade-long personal drought but doing so at the track where his father won 40 years ago and where Graham won in 2015.
“To get a win here, particularly to get that eight-year monkey off my back, you guys would have no clue what that would mean,” Graham Rahal said.
Rahal draws parallels to the Buckeyes’ championship run last season, a postseason that began with questions surrounding head coach Ryan Day but ended with a championship run that silenced the doubters.
“We’ll continue to try to have the Ryan Day sort of motto: All it takes is one to change,” Rahal said. “Hopefully, we have a good weekend.”
