Bobby Rahal likes to take a hands-off approach in the career of his 20-year-old son, Graham.
Even so the winner of three open-wheel championships and the 1986 Indianapolis 500 will offer his counsel when he thinks the time is right.
This offseason, which followed his son’s rookie season in the IndyCar Series, was one of those times.
“I told him at one point, ‘You know, you can make this your team, but you’ve got to do the work. You just can’t show up and drive the car,’ ” the elder Rahal explained. “I said, ‘You’ve got to be part of the team. You’ve got to get everybody to work for you, with you. The way you do that is by being more than just a driver. You (become) a human being to them. You want to be a leader.’ “
That’s a daunting task for a driver barely out of his teens racing for an elite team in American open-wheel racing that won eight championships and 105 victories in CART and its now-defunct successor Champ Car.
After playing a junior role to four-time Champ Car champion Sebastien Bourdais in 2007, Graham Rahal’s Newman/Haas/Lanigan Racing team was one of the teams that made the difficult transition to IndyCar at the start of 2008 as part of the unification of American open-wheel racing.
Veteran Justin Wilson was hired as Rahal’s teammate and it was the British driver who was considered the team leader last year.
With Wilson now driving for Dale Coyne Racing, Rahal is carrying most of his team’s expectations despite the experience of new teammate Robert Doornbos of The Netherlands.
“I think it doesn’t only come from me,” Rahal said. “Obviously, everybody’s got to improve. Last year was a tough year for everybody, for the entire team.
“Surely, everybody needs to up their level and I do more than anybody. We need to win races this year. We need to contend in the end. And, the way that I look at it, I see no reason why that shouldn’t be possible. We should be able to be competitive.”
That’s a big order, considering what took place last year.
The former Champ Car teams and drivers had only six weeks to prepare for the 2008 season, and they spent the entire year playing catch-up to the traditional IndyCar teams, particularly on the oval tracks after coming from a series that was mostly run on circuits with left and right turns.
Rahal crashed in a preseason test on the oval at Homestead-Miami Speedway and had to skip the season-opener at that track. He surprised everyone by winning his IndyCar debut on the streets of St. Petersburg, Fla. — at 19, the youngest driver ever to win a major open-wheel event — then struggled through most of the rest of the season, crashing out of seven races.
“The newness of everything,” Rahal said. “I think at the beginning of the year we were trying to drive the cars completely wrong on the ovals. That was the time when I had the bulk of my incidents. To be completely honest, we were trying to tune these cars using the aerodynamics on the ovals and, although that’s the logical way to do it, it’s not, in my opinion, the right way.
“It put me in a lot of tough situations. Those (crashes) are nothing that anybody’s proud of. Certainly nobody wants to crash.”
Things are different this year, with all the former Champ Car teams having had the winter to work on developing their cars and prepare for 2009.
It showed in the opener two weeks ago in St. Petersburg, where Rahal won his first IndyCar pole and finished seventh in the race despite being bumped off course in the race’s first turn. Wilson finished third for Coyne, another former Champ Car owner.
This week, Rahal and Wilson will be among the favorites at the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach, the first race for IndyCar at the longtime Champ Car venue.
“I think we’ll be good at Long Beach and we should have a chance to win,” Rahal said. “But the competition this year is so close. It’s going to be more of a difficult season than what we’ve had before, more than anything I’ve experienced, for sure.”
And he won’t have his father constantly nearby, as he has the past few seasons.
The elder Rahal, co-owner of Rahal Letterman Racing, is out of the IndyCar Series this year while his team searches for sponsorship. Rahal Letterman is concentrating instead on working with BMW on a new sports car program in the American Le Mans Series, which does run a handful of races as support events for IndyCar.
“It’s probably a good thing, to be honest,” Graham Rahal said. “I’m going to focus a little bit more. I’ve taken the offseason more serious than ever and I think the crew has done the same and so we need to do everything we can to focus on our team and our team only.
“But I’ll still talk to my dad. We link with ALMS at a few races and I can’t imagine him not coming to a few of the other races. And there’s always the telephone.”
Bobby Rahal, who chose to have his son gain his experience driving for other people’s teams, is happy Graham will be more independent this year without his father just down the paddock.
“When Graham was playing soccer, when it came time to score, he wanted the ball,” the elder Rahal said. “He knows this is his chance to step up and be the star, the guy they look to for their future success.
“I think he feels very comfortable where he’s at and confident. I think we saw that (at St. Petersburg). Making the top 10 is tough. But to go out there and go faster than guys like (Dario) Franchitti and (Scott) Dixon, I don’t care how old you are, that’s tough, let alone at 20 years old with half the experience they have. I’m really impressed with his commitment this year.”
The younger Rahal hopes a lot more people are impressed before 2009 is over.
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