Graham Rahal isn’t planning to retire anytime soon. At least not this year. Well, at least not right now, as we stand underneath the Pagoda on Tuesday morning as rain fell and hampered the first practice day of the 2023 Indianapolis 500. The timing is important, because as he hints at, things can always change.

And he hasn’t talked to any other teams in the paddock about a potential shift from driving for his family team, Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing, which he’s been with full-time since the start of 2013, after his contract expires at the end of this season. That, too, could also change, Rahal said.

So much about his career depends on these next few weeks at IMS, and the next couple race weekends that follow early. In recent years, Rahal has fended off questions about imminent retirement, his actual sway over the team in his current role as solely a driver and whether he’d ever stray from RLL’s ongoing project.

Tuesday, Rahal faced the questions head-on.

“I still enjoy (racing), no doubt. But I don’t enjoy not being competitive. Everybody thinks I’m being dramatic, but the reality is true. I put my shoe on this morning, and as I’m bending over with my right leg, all the sciatic (expletive) that’s going on in my leg, it freaking hurts,” Rahal told reporters. Last year, the 34-year-old driver revealed to IndyStar he’d been dealing with a torn labrum dating back to his childhood, and he battled through a significant wrist injury all of the 2022 season, to go along with constant leg pain.

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“I still have the fire, there’s no doubt, but there’s a lot of other factors that go into this. Do I see myself leaving at the end of this year? When my deal is up, do I see myself retiring? No, but I’m also not going to sit here and not run up front when I know I can compete with those guys. I just don’t want to sit here and keep running around in 20th. That’s not a selfish thing – it’s actually the opposite. Eventually, you’ve got to look internally and go, ‘Look, am I the piece of the puzzle that’s not really clicking here? Do I need to step away and bring in a different vibe?’”

Quickly, Rahal notes that all the team’s various sponsor deals are signed and set for the next couple years, “but they all have my name in the contract, so where am I going to go?”

“Anything is on the table,” he continued. “I’ve literally made no decision, even with going somewhere else. I’ve made no decision. I think I have a lot to add to the equation. Period. I’m very confident in saying that.”

For example, Rahal said, he told the team’s engineers that, given the heavy degradation he’d experienced with the Firestone alternate tires during Friday’s practice and qualifying and Saturday’s warmup for the GMR Grand Prix, he was confident the 85-lapper would be a “primary race” – meaning the optimal strategy would be to run the alternate (red) tires for one stint, as all teams must, and then run the rest on the primary (blacks).

Six of the top-7 drivers on the grid started on black tires. The one who didn’t – Alex Palou – started on new reds and ran blacks the rest of the race. He won by nearly 17 seconds. That’s what Rahal still thinks he can bring, among other things, with a high-level open-wheel racing career that began in Champ Car in 2007 when he was 18 years old. He’s planning to run his 16th Indy 500 later this month, where he’s finished third twice and had what looked to be a truly dominant car in 2021 before a loose wheel fell off immediately following a pitstop past the halfway point, ending his day.

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But Rahal also acknowledges he hasn’t won a race in nearly six years – dating back to the 2017 doubleheader at Detroit that he swept for his 5th and 6th career victories. Five of those came within a three-year span from 2015-17 when he finished 4th, 5th and 6th in the points race. More recently, he still managed 6th in 2020 with three podium finishes and five top-5s. He followed that with 7th in 2021 and then a drop to 11th a year ago – his first finish outside the top-10 since 2014.

Though he and the team’s 2022 season finished far better than the start, with the help of a mid-summer test at Sebring that revamped some of the team’s technical philosophies, the start to the 2023 season hasn’t continued that upward trajectory. His best finish has been a season-opening 6th at St. Pete, in a race where a large chunk of the field crashed out, and his other top-10 (10th in Saturday’s GMR Grand Prix) has sandwiched crashing out of Texas (no fault of his own) and runs of 12th at Long Beach and 17th at Barber.

Rahal sits 15^th in points. This past weekend, Rahal qualified 8^th for the race on the IMS road course race, and though that put him third on his team during a resurgent qualifying performance, he was only a few hundredths of a second away from giving RLL three spots in the Fast 6. After suffering a flat tire in the opening laps and having to go into a massive fuel save the rest of the way, he still managed 10^th. Lundgaard slipped from pole and finished 4^th, and Harvey suffered multiple in-race issues and drifted back to 20^th.

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After finishing a disappointing 14th, 18th and 24th in the 500 a year ago, both Rahal and Harvey said Tuesday they feel hopeful that the team’s IMS oval program is much improved, but there’s nothing definitive yet to know as new technical director Stefano Sordo attempts to get hold of his newfound IndyCar knowledge to try and steer the ship. Related, former RLL team president Piers Phillips parted ways with the team this offseason.

“We need to get more competitive, and I want to see signs that things are turning the right way. I would just say that over the last couple years, we had some individuals that prohibited us from advancing, in my opinion, and those people are gone now,” Rahal said. “Now, it’s time for us to be the aggressors with engineering and the staff in general. It’s time for the team to be in an aggressive stance versus not being aggressive enough.”

Without an agent or manager to negotiate his contracts, Rahal says he has in the past, and will continue to work in concert with team co-owner Mike Lanigan to hash out the next step in his career.

“I haven’t talked to anyone – I don’t even talk to (dad, Bobby Rahal) about it. Everything financial is Mike Lanigan,” the younger Rahal said. “I’ll start talking at some point, but I’ve got a lot of other things to worry about first.”

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Graham Rahal weighing future with contract up, including leaving RLL