Ryan Hunter-Reay didn’t get to enjoy his first IRL IndyCar victory for long.
Just days after winning at Watkins Glen on July 26, the 27-year-old driver found out that his mother has colon cancer.
“She’s doing OK. The thing that’s really been hard about it is being away from her with all the traveling we have to do,” said Hunter-Reay, who drives for Rahal-Letterman Racing, based in the Columbus, Ohio, suburb of Hillard.
“It’s tough, but at least racing gives me something I can deal with, something I’m having some effect on. I feel blessed to have racing.”
That focus has helped a team that has struggled at times to be competitive in the past few years.
In 2004, the team co-owned by former driving star Bobby Rahal and TV personality David Letterman got three wins, including the Indianapolis 500, from Buddy Rice, who finished third in the points. The next year, Danica Patrick joined Rice on the team and made a big impact, starting and finishing fourth at Indy, as well as winning three poles and drawing international attention to the sport.
Veteran Vitor Meira was also part of what was then a strong three-car effort at Rahal Letterman. But things have changed considerably in the intervening years.
Rice, Patrick and Meira are all driving for different teams now. Sponsors have drifted away. And Rahal-Letterman has also dealt with the death of Paul Dana in a crash before his first race with the team in 2006.
Jeff Simmons, the driver who replaced Dana, had little success before being replaced with six races left last season by Hunter-Reay. And Scott Sharp, who finished eighth in the points last year with three top-10s, left the team in a rancorous dispute in which both sides filed breach of contract suits that were later settled.
That left Hunter-Reay part of a one-car operation that now has even more competition than in the past, thanks to IndyCar absorbing former rival Champ Car into one league.
“It’s crazy competitive now,” Hunter-Reay said. “Those guys have made a good transition and, when you think about, it somebody who qualified fifth or sixth at a certain race last year, well, they’re probably 10th or 11th now with the same time.”
Scott Roembke, the team’s CEO, calls the races for Hunter-Reay from the pits and is sold on the young driver.
“Ryan only ran six races last year, so this is really his first full year in the IndyCar Series and he is adapting and progressing pretty much as we had hoped,” Roembke said. “His win at Watkins Glen gave him the confidence in his ability that he needed to run up front with these guys, and he has certainly been every bit as competitive as we expected he would be.
“At the same time, he continues to learn every week about the tracks and the guys he is running with, so I expect he will keep progressing and become a title contender.”
Rahal, a three-time series champion and the 1986 Indy winner, said he too likes what he has seen from his latest driver.
“The best thing about having a one-car team is that, as a driver, you can make the team your own,” he said. “We challenged Ryan to do that at the beginning of the year and he has stepped up and done it.
“He has had to make some adjustments in his mind-set to tailor his approach to racing on ovals, and he has made huge improvements in that area. He has consistently shown his ability to run with the top guys in the series and can be considered a threat at every track we go to, which is something that is very hard to do week in and week out in IndyCar after the unification.”
Hunter-Reay could easily have been one of the drivers making the transition this season. Racing for several different Champ Car teams, he won a race in Australia as a rookie in 2003 and added an impressive wire-to-wire victory for another team the next year at Milwaukee. But, by the middle of the 2005 — with yet another team — he was out of a ride.
“I guess I could have gone home and sat on the couch, eating twinkies or something,” Hunter-Reay said. “But there’s no certainty in racing, even when you’re doing a good job. After that, I just got into anything I could drive — A1GP, NASCAR testing, Daytona prototypes. I think I did pretty well in all of them.”
But little was happening on the open-wheel front until Rahal called.
“Like a snap of the fingers, it just happened,” Hunter-Reay said. “I’ve always had 100 percent confidence in myself that I could win, given the right race car. And IndyCar racing’s where I want to be. I’m only getting started, is how I feel.”
Although Hunter-Reay crashed and finished 19th at Nashville in the race following his victory — the first for the team since 2004 — he heads to Infineon Raceway this week with three straight top-10 finishes that have him eighth in the season points.
“We’re not necessarily happy with those results, just because they’re top-10s,” he said. “Something happened in every one of those races that kept us from getting a better finish, and we’ve got to get past that.
“But we’re making good progress. We’re developing chemistry, and not just with the engineering side, but with our whole crew. When you have those guys behind you, it makes you push that much harder when you need to.”
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