Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing
Pre-Race Notes
Firestone Grand Prix of St. Petersburg – Streets of St. Petersburg, Florida
Round 1 of 17 in the 2024 NTT INDYCAR SERIES
DATE: Friday – Sunday, March 8-10, 2024
PRACTICE BROADCAST: Live on Peacock Premium on Friday from 2:45–4:00 p.m. ET, Saturday from 9:35–10:35 a.m. ET and Sunday from 9:10–9:40 a.m. ET. Also live on the INDYCAR Radio Network (IRN) and www.indycar.com (timing & scoring + live analysis).
QUALIFYING BROADCAST: Live on Peacock Premium, the IRN and www.indycar.com (timing & scoring + live analysis) from 2:00 – 3:30 p.m. ET Saturday.
RACE BROADCAST: Live on NBC Sunday, March 8 from 12:00-2:30 p.m. ET. And also on Peacock Premium, IRN and Sirius XM 160.
TRACK LAYOUT: 1.8-mile, 14-turn street course
RACE LENGTH: 100 laps / 181 miles
2023 WINNER: Marcus Ericsson
2023 POLESITTER: Romain Grosjean (59.5532; 108.810 mph)
RLL’S TOP START / FINISH AT ST. PETE: 5th by Sato in 2018 / 2nd by Rahal in 2018; will be team’s 17th event here
RAHAL’S BEST START / FINISH IN ST. PETE: 1st in 2009 / 1st in 2008 – both with Newman/Haas/Lanigan Racing; will be his 17th race here
RAHAL’S HIGHEST SERIES START / FINISH: 5 Poles – St. Pete (street) 2009, Kansas (oval) 2009, Detroit (street) 2017, IMS (road) 2023, Portland (road) 2023 / 6 Wins – St. Pete 2008, Fontana (oval; 500 miles) 2015, Mid-Ohio (road) 2015, Texas (oval) 2016; Detroit Race 1 (street) 2017, Detroit Race 2 2017
FITTIPALDI’S BEST START / FINISH IN ST. PETE: Will be his first race here
FITTIPALDI’S HIGHEST SERIES START / FINISH: 10th at Phoenix (2018) / 9th at Portland (2018) – six series starts to date
LUNDGAARD’S BEST START / FINISH IN ST. PETE: 11th / 9th – both in 2023; will be his third race here
LUNDGAARD’S BEST SERIES START / FINISH: 2 Poles – IMS (road) May 2023, Toronto (street) 2023 / 1 Win – Toronto 2023
NEWS & NOTES:
RAHAL LETTERMAN LANIGAN RACING AT ST. PETE
The 2024 Firestone Grand Prix of St. Petersburg will mark the 17th INDYCAR SERIES race for Rahal Letterman Lanigan (RLL) Racing in St. Petersburg in the event’s 20th anniversary race. The team has entered the No. 15 Fifth Third Bank Honda for Graham Rahal, the No. 30 OAKBERRY / Pneustore Honda for Pietro Fittipaldi and the No. 45 Hy-Vee Honda for Christian Lundgaard. The team led 11 laps with Takuma Sato in 2012 and four laps with Hunter-Reay in 2008 (G. Rahal won w/NHLR that year) and has earned eight top-10 finishes (Rahal & Lundgaard were sixth and 9th in 2023 here). The highest starting position by the team is fifth place by Takuma Sato and highest finish is second by Graham Rahal – both in 2018.
MAKING HISTORY IN ST. PETE – GRAHAM RAHAL
In 2024, Graham will make his 17th Indy car start at this track. His best start here is pole in 2009 and best finish is a win in 2008 in his INDYCAR SERIES debut – both history-making moments at the time as he became the youngest race winner in series history (2008), and youngest pole winner in series history (2009). Both records were eclipsed in 2019 by Colton Herta but he held them for 10 and 11 years, respectively. Overall, he has earned one top-five and seven top-10 starts here and has two top-five and seven top-10 finishes, including sixth place here last year. Year-by-year details are available upon request. Last year, he started 20th and utilized a black/red/black tire strategy which played out well with the caution periods and he finished sixth. Eddie Jones, whom he worked with for five of his six victories and was reunited with in 2023 continues as Rahal’s race engineer. Team Manager Derek Davidson returns in the role of calling race strategy and Thomas Semik II will be his new chief mechanic after serving in the same role on the No. 30 entry last season. After a strong test in Sebring, Florida on February 27, where he ran the fifth fastest lap time of the day, he is looking forward to applying what was learned to the 20th annual Firestone Grand Prix of St. Petersburg.
“The 2023 season was solid at the end. I definitely want to make sure we start this year off well though. It would be great to get a pole, get a win early in the season. A handful of good results would put us in contention and allow us to get to the midsummer part of the season in a better position than we have been in the last few years.
“The off-season felt very slow with the lack of testing. However, on the shop side of things, there was a lot going on, and a lot of new people joining the team over the winter. We’ve seen some positives for sure and I’m eager to see how our performance can be as we go into the start of the year.
“We ran a bunch of test laps at Sebring (Feb. 27). I thought the new tire Firestone brought was pretty good. The durability was strong, which allowed us to get through a lot of things on our checklist, which was great. I’m looking forward to seeing how any of the gains that we made there help us as we go into St. Pete. I thought there were some good things we learned for sure, and we were competitive across all three cars which was good to see. It’s definitely cool to have won at St. Pete but it’s been a long time. I’ve had a couple of good results here as of late, but I definitely want to see us be at the sharp end of the grid. We don’t want to come from mid-pack and have to go forward. We’d like to be at the sharp end and make our lives a lot easier. It will be important to start strong and get a good result for Fifth Third Bank.”
PIETRO MAKES HIS INDYCAR SERIES RETURN
Pietro Fittipaldi, the Brazilian-American grandson of 1989 INDYCAR champion and two-time Indy 500 winner Emerson Fittipaldi, returns to the series after having made nine starts in 2018 and 2021 for Dale Coyne Racing. Of his nine starts in the series, six were on oval tracks and three were on road courses. His best career start is 10th in Phoenix (oval) and ninth in Portland (road) – both in 2018. He tested at Sebring International Raceway on Monday, February 26 and was on a lap that was -0.4 of his best lap thus far, which would have put him in the top-10 with his teammates at the conclusion of the two-day test. He has fully immersed himself in his first full-season opportunity in the series by moving to Indianapolis to be as prepared as possible for the challenge both physically and mentally.
“Since the announcement in October, I still had the remaining Formula One races to go to and tested for Haas F1 in Abu Dhabi. After the testing finished in December, I came straight to Indianapolis and moved into my new apartment 10 minutes from the team in Zionsville. I went straight from finishing one season and straight into another one. It’s been very exciting getting used to living in Indianapolis and getting to know the team, using the Honda static sim weekly which has been very good to get me up to speed. We only had two test days before St. Pete so there was a lot for me to learn. I’m going into many tracks that I don’t know, only four of the 16 tracks, we will race on so using the simulator is a very important tool. I have also been seeing my teammates from time to time. Christian and Graham are great guys and there is a lot I can learn from them. I’m looking forward to the start of the season.
“I have been training a lot. Last year I was racing in the World Endurance Championship, alongside my reserve driver role in F1 and, for endurance racing, the lighter the driver is, the lighter the car is so if I was lighter I could gain performance so I lost a lot of weight from my normal weight – probably 15 pounds. And now shifting my focus to INDYCAR, I believe that the heavier and bigger you are, is a performance advantage. If you are lighter, you have to put ballast in the car so at the end of the day everyone is going to weigh the same but if you’re heavier and stronger, it’s much better for the driver in INDYCAR because the car is so physical to drive. So, my focus in the off season was putting on weight. I gained around 20-25 pounds in three months just by changing my training to one that is fully focused on strength. And I was eating a lot more just to gain that size for the physicality of driving the INDYCAR.
“An INDYCAR is much heavier with no power steering so it’s really a beast to drive. You have to really hustle the car around the track to produce a lap time. Whatever car you race in, the principals are always the same. You need to be good under breaking, you need to know how to extract a lap time on new tires and understand the tire degradation for the race runs. The principals are the same but every car and series has its own characteristics and that what’s new to me.
“Pre-season testing has been great. We’ve been able to tick all the boxes we wanted in testing in terms of the setup as well as all the things I wanted to learn before St. Pete. There is a lot more to learn as the season goes on but we’re in a good place. St. Pete is one of the toughest tracks in my opinion. It’s a short track but it has some interesting characteristics and takes a lot of rhythm to be able to produce very quick lap times there so the goal going into the event is being patient, turning up the volume as the weekend goes and really extracting the most out of the car when it counts in qualifying and the race but we know it’s not going to be easy. We’re starting at one of the toughest tracks of the calendar so it’s about continuous progression throughout the season. That’s the way I want to see it. So going into St. Pete, I’m going in calm, executing, maximizing what we can do that weekend and then continuously progressing throughout the season. That’s the goal.
“I’ve been to the St. Pete race once as a spectator and I think it’s a great event. It’s packed with fans and it’s a race in Florida so it’s almost like a hometown race for me. I was born and raised in Miami. St. Pete is a bit far from Miami but it’s as close as we’re going to get. I’ve been watching a lot of race footage and onboard video and I can tell it’s a tough little track. It’s one of those tracks that looks simple but it’s not. And it’s going to be tough to master it. I’m looking forward to it.”
THE THIRD TIME WILL BE THE CHARM FOR CHRISTIAN
Christian Lundgaard, 2022 INDYCAR Rookie of the Year and eighth place finisher in the 2023 INDYCAR season, will start his third full season in the INDYCAR SERIES in 2024. He broke through to win his first series victory on the streets of Toronto in 2023, from pole no less. And brought the team two of its four poles in 2023 to match Team Penske in the second-most poles for the year. In St. Pete last year, he started 11th and finished ninth. He has high expectations for 2024 after setting the second fastest time during his test day at Sebring on February 26 and ending up seventh overall after the two-day test concluded and lap times dropped the second day on February 27th.
“The 2023 season is one we can rate higher than 2022 for sure. We made improvements on true results and by the end of the season, based on where we ended up, the paper tells the story. We were disappointed with how the season started but we managed to turn things around which is an extremely tough task to do as well, so I’m proud of everyone for doing that. We got two poles and a win on the 45 car, so I’m proud of that and, as a team, having four poles and tying for second-most with Team Penske across the paddock is a positive. Hopefully we can improve that for 2024.
“The off season has been extremely long, too long to be honest. It’s been six months without being in the car and having one productive day of testing before going into the first race of the season but luckily, we ended up being pretty competitive at the Sebring test. We weren’t so much at Homestead for that January test, but I also didn’t really think we were going to use that test for anything because we don’t race there and not much information transfers to other tracks. But there has been a lot of communication behind the scenes with my crew, my race engineer Ben, Tim (Trowbridge) who moved up from data engineer to performance engineer, Tom (Vigne, chief mechanic) and the new people coming into the team. I think we have made a lot of progress. The ambitions are high, and the emotions are there. We’re all pretty excited to get into the 2024 season and obviously personally I’m pretty excited. I feel ready to get going to see if we can bring the No. 45 Hy-Vee Honda into victory lane again and hopefully do it in the first race of the season.
“If I compare the 2023 season to the 2024 season, feeling-wise, having left Sebring, I feel a lot better than I think I would have done had we not done the test. I think there were a lot of unknowns before testing in Sebring just because of the lack of testing. It was the one day of testing we had before the season and the 2022 and 2023 St. Pete experience was very similar in terms of performance but I do feel like, leaving Sebring, I feel more confident that we gained performance being fifth (Graham) and seventh (Christian) fastest across the two days between the 15 and the 45 cars so the potential is there. We just need to execute in St. Pete. Obviously, Sebring is the one track that we can replicate to a street course like St. Pete. We found some good tools, we improved the car and put it in a better window so there is a lot to be excited for.”
2023 HIGHLIGHTS
At the conclusion of the 2023 INDYCAR SERIES season, RLL was tied for second in most pole positions with four poles (two by Lundgaard, two by Rahal). Only four-driver team, Andretti Global, had more at five poles, and only Team Penske had as many. The team won the Honda Indy Toronto, Lundgaard’s first victory, and earned another podium with second place for Graham Rahal at the second grand prix at IMS in August. The team aims to carry the momentum gained in the last half of the 2023 season into 2024.