Graham Rahal behind the wheel of dad Bobby's race car.
by Ben Smith
The videotape is semi-legendary now. Graham Rahal has mentioned it a zillion times now these last five or six years, because it's a good place to start with him, a good place to trace the source of everything he is and maybe is yet to become.
On the tape, it's the early 1990s, and Graham Rahal is maybe 3 years old. Someone asks him what he wants to be when he grows up. And out of the mouth of the babe comes this, or something close to it: “I want to be a professional race-car driver. Or, a professional golfer.”
Twenty-one or twenty-two years later, Rahal plays golf to a six handicap and has days when he's really good and days when he's, well, not so good. It's a small clue which path he chose, or perhaps which path chose him.
“Obviously I made up my mind pretty early what I wanted to do,” Graham Rahal says today, as he prepares to tackle the Indianapolis 500 for the seventh time.
Or as one of his team owners puts it: “I think he was pre-ordained to be where he is today.”
And that's not just because the team owner is also his father. Or, that his father's face is on the Borg-Warner Trophy, along with all other Indy 500 winners.
Racing's In the Genes
Before there was the son, there was the father. This is that kind of story.
It's a story of blood and family and maybe destiny, and it begins with a bespectacled, introspective man named Bobby Rahal, who came out of the heart of Ohio in an all-consuming hurry. As a race car driver, he won three championships and 24 races in Indy cars in a career that spanned 17 seasons and was highlighted by victory in the 1986 Indianapolis 500.
Six years after climbing out of the car for the last time, he won Indy as a car owner himself. Buddy Rice brought his Rahal-Letterman ride home first in 2004; the next year, Danica Patrick burst upon the IndyCar world in Rahal-Letterman colors, finishing fourth in the 500 as a rookie.
By that time, another kid was beginning to make some noise. Bobby's kid.
He'd long ago decided to forgo the 1-iron for the internal combustion engine, and if his father today sees that as pre-ordained, it was despite his own ambivalence. On the one hand, Graham had been hanging around the track since he was 5 or 6 years old; Bobby would even take him to sponsor dinners, where Graham would put his head in his dad's lap and fall asleep. On the other hand, he didn't exactly push his son behind the wheel.
“It took a while for me actually to convince my dad to let me race,” Graham says now. “For a long, long time he was really against it. It's funny to think about it now, but my dad was the kind of guy who wouldn't let me play football because he didn't want me to get injured, but he eventually let me drive an IndyCar.”
That's because the kid had talent, almost from the jump. A year after Patrick made her debut for his dad's race team, Graham took the Champ Car Atlantic series by storm, winning five races and finishing second in the points. He was 17 years old.
The next year he was signed by Newman/Haas/Lanigan as its No. 2 driver in Champ Car, after which he promptly crashed on the first lap of his first race. Two weeks later, in his third Champ Car race, he finished second at Houston to become the youngest driver in series history to gain a podium finish.
The next year, of course, he really burst onto the scene. Newman/Haas/Lanigan moved into IndyCar–and Graham Rahal, mere weeks before turning 20, won his very first IndyCar race at St. Petersburg.
He finished fifth in the points that year. And then … stuff happened.
“You think you finish fifth in the championship in 2009 at 20 years old, there's nothing but good things,” Bobby says. “But then the team folded, they lost their sponsor and he had to struggle for the next couple years.”
The sponsor was McDonald's, which bailed on IndyCar to throw its money into the 2010 Winter Olympics. That cost Graham his ride with Newman/Haas/Lanigan, and he scuffled around as driver-for-hire for a couple of years, running races for Sarah Fisher and Dreyer & Reinbold and Chip Ganassi. He even ran the 2010 Indianapolis 500 for his dad's team.
In 2013, his dad hired him again, this time as Rahal/Letterman/Lanigan's only full-time driver. And the family circle closed.
If not always perfectly.
Family Matters
Of course it's different. How could it not be, blood kin being what blood kin is?
And so when Bobby Rahal hired Graham Rahal, he pulled him aside and said, listen, no matter what, there must be respect. The old man had to respect what his son had achieved. The son had to respect what the old man had achieved. And, no, it wouldn't be easy at times.
“It represents a big challenge, frankly, because you need to keep it on a very professional level,” Bobby says. “When it's a family business, emotion can play a big part. That's something I've always really guarded myself against: allowing the emotional side, the father-son element, to get in the way of the owner-driver element. And it's hard. You really have to stay on guard to ensure that you really treat this in a professional manner.”
Graham, for his part, acknowledges that. But he also says the professional relationship/family relationship balancing act has been easier than he expected, perhaps a tribute to how hard his dad has worked at it.
“I thought that we'd bump heads more than we have, frankly,” Graham says.
And they could have. Since that first giddy triumph at St. Petersburg, Graham hasn't won an IndyCar race, and last season, with a rules package that favored the Chevys over the Hondas run by Rahal/Letterman/Lanigan, Graham finished 18th in the points with just two top-five finishes. At Indianapolis, where he's finished in the top 10 just once, he qualified 26th and finished 25th, completing just seven laps before getting caught up in a crash.
This season, with Juan Pablo Montoya and 1995 500 winner and former Formula One champion Jacques Villeneuve back in Indy cars, the challenges remain. But changes in the engineering group, positive results in testing and the signing of veteran driver Oriol Servia as a second driver for a limited number of races has the Rahal/Letterman/Lanigan camp feeling optimistic.
As is the father about the son.
“Graham doesn't make a lot of mistakes,” says Bobby, critiquing his son's driving style. “He doesn't have a lot of crashes and that type of thing. He's pretty smart about what he wants in the car and he's very good at deciphering what the car needs. So I don't think he's too dissimilar from my driving style in general.
“I think he's ultimately a little bit faster than I was, frankly. And if we give him a good year and the confidence level he's gonna have from that, he's just gonna be tough to beat.”
It is, after all, what his son does. Pre-ordained or not.
