Alex Palou wins, but Rahal gets measure of satisfaction with first top-3 effort in almost three years.
Veteran racer Graham Rahal loved proving his detractors wrong Sunday.The Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing headliner recorded his first podium finish in nearly three years at the Children’s of Alabama IndyCar Grand Prix near Birmingham.
And it was a gratifyingly fitting response to what he called “all the noise and B.S. that we get to hear all the time. There’s enough bullshit out there that I got to deal with.”Rahal said ending his drought that dates back to August 2023 on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course likely won’t silence his pesky critics: “I’ll still hear it. It’s funny, you read Twitter every day: ‘He can’t qualify.’ I qualified in the second row last week. Just shut up. There’s a whole lot of dumbasses out in this world right now. Pardon my French.”He praised his No. 15 Honda crew for “great pit stops, great strategy” at Barber Motorsports Park and said, “All weekend the car was in really good shape, very, very competitive, very comfortable. It was extremely stable. “Trust me, I wanted the podium today badly. I really wanted to be P2. I wanted the podium badly to go into this break,” Rahal said, referring to the series’ breathless pace with four races in five March weekends.” A little pressure off the guys. Spirit’s really for the team. We can go off to Long Beach—it will be great. Indy GP we should be very strong. Some of the stuff we did this weekend should be even better for us. I'm excited for the opportunities ahead for our team right now.”Still, Rahal said, “I was losing the rear a lot no matter what I felt like I could do on tire degradation. That’s been our Achilles’ heel so far this year. We’ve got some work to do. It’s a good relief this early in the year to have a good result. Now our job is to go analyze and figure out why: What changes did we make to put our car so much further into the window than most other road course races and how can we take that to the GP and Indy in particular?”Alex Palou was Sunday’s winner on the 2.3-mile permanent road course before the NTT IndyCar Series will regroup April 17-19 in Southern California for the Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach.Rahal said he “wasn't so worried about” Team Penske’s David Malukas, who was zooming up on him late in the race and finished fourth Sunday. Arrow McLaren’s Christian Lundgaard, runner-up to Palou, was more of a worry to him. And that was for good reason. Lundgaard overtook Rahal with three laps to go in the 90-lap affair. But Rahal said Lundgaard’s “strength was my weakness. Everywhere else we could pull him a little bit. I was dying in Turns 2 and 3. That was the best part of the track he had. Unfortunately, those two just didn't blend very well.“We did the best that we could. That’s life,” he said. “He was obviously on a charge and we had done a few more laps than him on those tires. I knew it was going to be a battle till the end. That's the way it goes.”For the second consecutive race at Barber Motorsports Park, all 25 cars were running at the end—a rarity. And Rahal could feel it. “A green-flag race, physical as hell. If anybody tells it wasn't, they're lying to you. Extremely tough. It was a battle to make it to the end,” he said.Andretti Global’s Kyle Kirkwood leads the standings by two points over Palou, 35 ahead of Lundgaard, and 40 more than Malukas.
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