Indy Car Media Interview with Graham Rahal of the Letterman-Rahal Racing Team
Graham Rahal Press Conference on 7.9.24 – Iowa Week
Both the Interview and transcripts are here as Graham brings you up to date on the 2024 season.
The Hybrid Engine debuts in Mid-Ohio
Here are a few questions. For the complete press conference, click the video.
Q. Graham, you had experience over the weekend with
the hybrid unit. How different is the oval going to be
dealing with that?
GRAHAM RAHAL: Yeah, I mean, Mid-Ohio was very
affected. It was definitely — had a big influence on the way
things went. Even in qualifying at Mid-Ohio, I ran out of
deployment out of Turn 9, and even compared to Christian,
my teammate, it was about a half a tenth of a second
difference. And obviously a half a tenth nowadays in
INDYCAR makes quite a large difference, so something to
be aware of.
However, I would say on the ovals, it’s less effective. I was
explaining to some people, hybrid is just like you think it is
in a street car. It is effective from how does a street car
work? The hybrid, the electric part works off of a stop sign,
but when you’re at the freeway speed, it’s not working, it’s
regenerating. It’s recharging the batteries when you’re on
the freeway; it’s using the internal combustion engine.
It’s the same for us. When you think of the test, the
minimum corner speeds were 180 miles an hour or
whatever they were, which is really wild, it’s not doing
much there.
But come race day, different conversation, because race
day when the minimum speeds really start to drop off, you’ll
see a greater effect in the way that the hybrid works.
On a place like Iowa, if I’m very honest with you, it’s going
to be a lot to deal with. A lot to deal with, because it’s
taking all of your strength and everything else to hold the
wheel, let alone be pulling paddles and pushing buttons
and doing all of those other things.
There’s some fine tuning that needs to happen on the
hybrid as we go forward, but I thought at Mid-Ohio it was
quite effective, and it worked pretty well.
His father-in-law John Force
Q. As for you personally as a racer, that happened on
a day you had a race, and you’ve had races since that
he’s been in the hospital. How were you able to focus
and do your job?
GRAHAM RAHAL: Well, that day was a little harder
because I was watching it live. Courtney was not. She
was still kind of taking a nap frankly. It was early morning
out in California. My girls were running her ragged.
When I saw it, I immediately went to her and said, hey, you
probably — you should probably wake up. You should
probably look and see what’s going on here.
Unfortunately I’ve seen a lot of crashes in NHRA. With
Courtney’s explosion in 2017 and Brittany has had hers
and John has had a lot over the last five years or so, but
you know when it’s different. You can see it. We all saw it.
It’s hard because at that stage the reality was that we didn’t
know anything. Laurie, my mother-in-law, was with me.
So we didn’t know anything. There was just so many
questions to be asked about what’s the condition. So it
wasn’t until really a day, day and a half later that we started
to get some clarity on what it was.
More on John Force
But this is racing. As much as I hate to be tone deaf to it,
because I’m not, these things happen. I can tell you that —
this is the truth. I’ve never said it in a public setting like
this, but when we lost Justin Wilson — when we lost Dan, it
was hard. When we lost Justin Wilson, he was a very
close friend of mine, and it took me years to kind of move
past the mental side of sitting in a car, particularly at
Indianapolis or at a superspeedway and not having it flash
through — like I said, I’ve never told anybody this, but not
have some sort of flash through my mind about Justin and
those sorts of things.
On that given Sunday with John, it was hard, but you’ve got
to do what you’ve got to do and go out there, and then
obviously from there our focus was just to get the girls to
him as fast as we could, get all of his daughters and get
Laurie out there and get him the care that he needed. So
very fortunate with that.
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