INDIANAPOLIS – Nearly a year removed from perhaps the saddest day of his racing career, Graham Rahal walked into the Indianapolis Motor Speedway with a bit of perspective. It wasn’t so much that failing to qualify for the Indianapolis 500 for the first time in his 17-year career was unexpected – it’s that after a painfully slow 500 Open Test last April, combined with a few head-scratching days of practice last May, Rahal could see the massive letdown coming.

And after a couple years of ringing the alarm bells regarding Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing’s performance during the Month of May, one of Rahal’s worst days in a race car finally helped bring about change. Wednesday, he was happy to report the fruits of those changes at the Racing Capital of the World, even after running just 38 laps in damp, cool conditions more than five weeks away from qualifying, were clear as day.

“I can assure you that the feeling at the end of today, even after just five or six runs, versus where we were the first day of the spring test here (a year ago) is a very different vibe within the team,” Rahal said Wednesday in an end-of-day press conference at IMS for the 500 Open Test. “And I hope that that will stay positive as we go into May.

“Our struggles last year are things that I had said to the team for years. It wasn’t that all a sudden, we were slow. We had been getting slow – like, we were falling behind for the years prior. But last year not qualifying (for the 500) was a real show of, ‘Hey, we are really far behind, and we need to get serious about this in a hurry.’ It allowed the owners to dig in, because I don’t think many of the issues were things that they were, frankly, that aware of.”

Listening to the differences Rahal described from Wednesday in what was just over three hours of total green-flag running in what was supposed to be 13 hours of track time over two days is almost jarring – even to a novice on the engineering side.

“Traditionally, I would have to downshift in order to build speed down the straightaway, and today was the first time in a while that I’d start to see speed, and the RPMs would start to come up like the car was responding well to it,” he said. “And when I’d get a sniff of a tow today – even a car seven or eight seconds in front – the speed would pick up.

“Most drivers, they’re probably thinking, ‘Yeah, that’s obvious. That’s the way it is.’ But last year, that’s not the way an RLL car was. We would probably fall further behind. That’s just a good indication. Those are things that we didn’t have last year.”

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The first signs of change came last June, when RLL noted it had parted ways with multiple members of its engineering team. Within a month, team co-owner Bobby Rahal was back-slapping second-year driver Christian Lundgaard in Victory Lane at Toronto, celebrating the team’s first IndyCar victory in more than three years – one the Dane won from pole. It would be the second of four poles RLL would capture that season – all of them, though, on road or street courses.

On ovals, RLL’s struggles for both qualifying pace and general raceability would continue. In 15 oval starts as a team in 2023, RLL would log just a single top-15 finish – Lundgaard’s 13^th-place result at Iowa. And without an oval race to start the year until the 108^th 500, there lingered early this year – and probably still does – an uncertainty as to just how much impact this offseason’s work has made.

Philosophies have now changed, with large sums of money spent in-kind. The results, whatever they may be, will come next.

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“The best thing to happen to this team was the worst thing to happen to this team, and that was me not qualifying (for the 500 last year),” Rahal said. “It clearly rings home for my dad and everybody else. Not to say that it doesn’t matter for any of the others, but it got serious in a hurry, and that made us really lock-in and focus on fixing a lot of items – particularly when it came to Indy.

“I don’t think it comes down to saying, ‘Oh, RLL had poor build quality in their race cars. That’s not accurate. But there’s a lot of intricacies in the way these things are built. There’s a lot of things that make a massive difference to the performance of a race car. When you get behind, or you go too far in certain areas that you thought was positive development, but it either isn’t or is negative development, those things are hard to be identified. And sometimes, you get just get stuck in this mentality of going down this path further and further, and you think it’s going to get better and better, and the reality is that’s not necessarily true. I think that’s what hurt us in the past.”

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Graham Rahal senses RLL's improved speed in Indy 500 Open Test