HONEST CHANGES HELP LUNDGAARD TO ROOKIE CROWN

Bobby Rahal, the 1982 CART Indycar Rookie of the Year, didn’t mince his words about how much his team had needed to turn its form around mid-season to enable Christian Lundgaard to clinch Indycar’s 2022 Roty honours, which he did at Laguna.

Although Lundgaard made a couple of typical rookie errors this year, enabling David Malukas of Dale Coyne Racing with HMD to close to within five points in the rookie standings entering the season finale, what could have prevented Lundgaard from taking the award was Rahal Letterman Lanigan’s strangely poor first half of the season.

“It’s been a tough year for us,” said three-time champion Rahal. “The first third or half of the year, very spotty. We did not give our drivers, Christian, Graham [Rahal] or Jack [Harvey], the cars that they deserved to have… There was a lot of soul-searching going on by halfway in the season. A year earlier we’d been much more competitive. We had embarked on a few development things, and there was clearly a lot of questioning.

“So they all went down and did this test [at Sebring] in the middle of summer. And we found a lot of answers. Some of those answers were not friendly to the things that we believed. We took those answers, and the next race, Toronto, we were back in the hunt.

“I’m proud of our team because… everybody was willing to accept the findings, whatever they may be, and there was no ego involved. All we wanted to do was become better and I think the results of that test were crucial for the remainder of our year.”