Graham Rahal’s rocky NTT INDYCAR SERIES season was capsulized by the last-lap happenings in the XPEL Grand Prix at Road America on June 21.

Rahal had passed Will Power for third place in Turn 6 only to have Power’s trailing car make contact with his approaching Turn 12. The impact sent Rahal sliding to the outside barrier, where it ricocheted into the gravel barrier.

Rahal (photo, top) had been on pace to be the highest-finishing Honda driver. Instead, it was a crushing 23rd-place finish.

“Two corners away from (a podium finish),” Rahal said with a sigh at the season-ending event at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca.

Rahal’s results in the 18-race campaign included a healthy amount of feast and more than his share of famine. The driver of Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing’s No. 15 Honda had three top-three finishes, but they were offset by six finishes in the 20s, including the one at Road America that could have been in the former category.

Only six drivers had more podium finishes, and had Power not knocked him sideways at Road America, he would have matched Team Penske’s Scott McLaughlin in that category. Series champion Alex Palou of Chip Ganassi Racing and Arrow McLaren’s Christian Lundgaard led the series with seven podiums each, while Andretti Global’s Kyle Kirkwood and Team Penske’s David Malukas had six apiece. Andretti Global’s Power had five.

Graham Rahal

Rahal’s podium finishes came in the Children’s of Alabama Indy Grand Prix at Barber Motorsports Park (photo, above), the Sonsio Grand Prix on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course and the Chevrolet Detroit Grand Prix. He qualified third and finished ninth in the Good Ranchers 250 at Phoenix Raceway in the season’s second race. In street racing, he qualified and finished ninth in the Ontario Honda Dealers Indy at Markham, Ontario, and led a season-high 12 laps in the Freedom 250 Grand Prix of Washington, D.C.

Yet, despite how well Rahal and his RLL crew performed in some events, their struggles at others left them 16th in the standings.

“So, while people want to discount us, I don't think that that's necessarily fair on a year like this year,” Rahal said. “We had a lot of good opportunities, but what our weakness was on one weekend we'd be on the podium, the next weekend we'd finish 23rd.

“Our highs were high, our lows were very, very low, and that's the frustration for me.”

Another example of that was in the August weekend in the OnlyBulls Grand Prix at Portland. Rahal qualified eighth – “(That position was) way better than I thought I was going to qualify,” he said – but he finished a lap off the pace in 23rd place.

“So, things like that (were) quite frustrating,” he said.

The six-time race winner in this series had already turned his focus to next season by the time the series arrived at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca for the Mission Foods Grand Prix of Monterey, the last race of the year. There, Rahal said he and the team will have their short oval package high on the list of areas to improve given their struggles at Nashville Superspeedway and the Milwaukee Mile in the second half of the season.

“I’m very decided to (2027) already to try to make sure we’re making the right moves, doing the right things,” Rahal said, adding that RLL will reset with two full-season entries (for Rahal and Louis Foster). “We’ve tried to keep up this three-car thing for many years, often at the great expense of our team owners. Just need to reset and rethink.

“It’s a very important time of the year to make sure that we're doing the right things.”