RAHAL BUMPED OUT OF 500
Graham Rahl sat on the sidepod of his No. 15 car, head in hands, sobbing as his children tried to steal a hug Sunday.
There was no consoling Rahal this time.
Thirty-eight minutes after bumping Jack Harvey off the Indianapolis 500 starting grid, Harvey returned the favor by edging his teammate and the team owner’s son out of next Sunday’s race on the last lap of last-chance qualifying by a miniscule .007 mph.
“I think everybody’s tried exceptionally hard over the last couple of days, we came up short. There’s not much else to say,” Rahal lamented after posting a four-lap average of 229.159. “This place, you’ve got to earn it. It’s not handed out, it’s not a given, it’s not a guarantee.”
He didn’t even get a second chance after spending more than a half-hour waiting inside the cockpit on a sun-drenched pit lane with an air hose and umbrella keeping him cool. Instead, Rahal got a firsthand view of crew members making adjustments to the No. 30 in the pit box directly in front of his just before time expired.
Everyone at Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing team understood this was a distinct possibility given the week they’d had on the 2.5mile oval.
The team’s four cars routinely finished near the bottom of the daily speed charts and none of the three fulltime IndyCar drivers qualified in the top 30 Saturday. Only Katherine Legge made the field, taking the final spot in the first round of qualifications.
Four drivers — rookie
Sting Ray Robb of Dale Coyne Racing, Rahal, Harvey and their teammate Christian Lundgaard — returned Sunday for the final three spots in next week’s race.
And all this after the team thought it had some momentum thanks to two top-10 finishes and Lundgaard’s polewinning run for last week’s Indianapolis Grand Prix.
How bad did things get for Rahal’s team?
“We’re going as fast as we did in 2020,” Bobby Rahal said before the second day of qualifications, which included a historic pole-winning run by Alex Palou.
It’s not clear if Bobby Rahal will try to buy out another driver in the field to ensure that his son and sponsors race in next week’s “Greatest Spectacle in Racing” — though it appears Graham
Rahal is willing to live with the result.
Larson is millionaire
Kyle Larson didn’t mince words after his third All-Star race victory in the last five years.
“That was an old-school (butt)-whipping, for sure,” Larson said.
Larson turned in a dominating effort to run away with his third All-Star race and earn $1 million Sunday night in the Cup Series’ return to North Wilkesboro (N.C.) Speedway following a 27-year absence.
He became only the fourth driver to win the AllStar race at least three times. Jimmie Johnson has the most with four victories, while Larson, Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt have three. Larson is the first to win the All-Star race at three
different tracks, also having won in Charlotte in 2019 and Texas in 2021.
He celebrated the win with a full lap of burnouts around the .625-mile track as Hendrick Motorsports won its 11th All-Star race.
Bubba Wallace finished second in the 200-lap nonpoints exhibition race, followed by Tyler Reddick, Chase Briscoe Chase Elliott.
But only Larson collected prize money in the winnertake-all event.
Wallace joked he won the “best of the rest.”
“Larson was lights-out, so congrats to him,” Wallace said. “They have been hitting it on the head all season, so to run second to them is not a bad thing. But to run second in the All-Star race sucks because you go home with nothing.”