Frustrations Follow Graham Rahal in Milwaukee Qualifying

WEST ALLIS, Wis.– Graham Rahal‘s car was not working well in qualifying for the NTT IndyCar Series doubleheader weekend at the Milwaukee Mile, and his positions on the provisional grid for both Hy-Vee 250s show it.

Before IndyCar applied grid penalties to all drivers with unapproved engine changes this weekend, Rahal qualified 24th for Saturday’s (Aug. 31) race and 26th for Sunday’s race out of 27 cars that posted times.

For comparison, Christian Lundgaard is provisionally 26th and 25th for both races while Pietro Fittipaldi is provisionally last in both races. Fittipaldi’s laps were slow enough that Indy NXT polesitter Louis Foster‘s two-lap qualifying average was faster than either of Fittipaldi’s laps.

After turning qualifying laps of 155.139 mph and 152.218 mph, Rahal went to pit road and voiced his concerns.

“Unfortunately that’s the reality for me,” Rahal said. “Today’s going to be damage limitation. Try to keep it on the blacktop and see where we finish. If I knew [what was missing] I would’ve done it right. I’m not trying to be a jerk, it’s just the reality. We threw the kitchen sink at her overnight. We really look back at all of our notes from years past and, you know, what we think and what we need.

“But if I had to guess, I think we’re way off. I don’t know. I just, I think that there’s some important components on the car that I don’t think are in the [window] relative to other teams. And unfortunately, we’re in a pretty bad spot with all of that. So we lean hard on Eddie and Todd Malloy and guys that we have that have a ton of experience around this place last night overnight. Because obviously Ash [Higham], my engineer, he’s barely ever, this is the first year ever doing an oval.

“So for him, this is all fresh, but he’s doing the best that he can. But we leaned on our experience last night and the outcome was clear. I mean, dude I about binned it on my out lap because I went out there today with this mentality that I was just gonna fucking go, and what happened kind of happened. So I went in to Turn 1 on my out lap with that mentality and when she went around on me in 2, it was clear as hell that we’re just not, it’s not there, man.”

Rahal was in discussion with his teammates after all three drivers completed their qualifying runs and the concerns seem to be shared among the drivers.