Entering 2026, Graham Rahal had gone the last two IndyCar seasons without a podium finish, and he had just one podium finish in four full seasons. But this year, Rahal has found his way back on the podium three times before the midway point of the season.
Rahal’s resurgence in the No. 15 Rahal Letterman Lanigan Honda has him in ninth in IndyCar’s championship, just behind two Team Penske entries (Josef Newgarden and Scott McLaughlin).
Recent years haven’t been the kindest to Rahal, the six-time race winner who finished top 10 every year from 2015 to 2021. But improvements to RLL have the 37-year-old competing again after his third-place finish in the Detroit Grand Prix.
Last spring, RLL hired Jay Frye as the team’s president after Frye was fired as IndyCar’s president following a six-year run in the position. Frye, a former Division I football player at Missouri, is using a football mindset to revamp RLL. He approaches race operations with what he calls a “blocking and tackling” strategy, where the basics of building a race car and limiting errors are emphasized.
“It’s basically doing the basics right and the fundamentals right,” Frye told IndyStar. “From a mechanical perspective, you’re going to have part failures, but you don’t want to have self-induced problems. … So fundamentally, we’re doing a much better job of that than we did in 2025.”
One place where RLL looks to perfect its blocking and tackling is through its pit stops. In the fall, RLL hired Kyle Sagan as the team’s pit stop manager, a position he held at Arrow McLaren in 2024 and 2025.
Sagan’s focus is pit stop consistency rather than trying to run the fastest stops in pit lane. Despite that, the No. 15 crew leads IndyCar’s Pit Stop Performance Award, which is based on the shortest average time in pit lane (when a full pit stop is performed). According to Frye, Sagan does a lot of “drills,” perfecting specific aspects of a pit stop before doing “scrimmages” (full pit stops) in the team’s Zionsville shop.
“Kyle’s been phenomenal,” Rahal told IndyCar.com. “His professionalism and focus on the details stand out. It’s about consistency. You don’t need to be a hero, but you don’t want to be a zero.”
Another crucial change the team has made is hiring Brian Barnhart to be the senior vice president of operations and strategist on the No. 15 entry. After spending the last three years being the general manager at Arrow McLaren (where he was also called strategy for Alexander Rossi and Christian Lundgaard), Barnhart — like Sagan — joined the RLL team that’s looking to return to its race-winning form.
Rahal and Barnhart have never worked together directly until now, but the two have established a camaraderie from Barnhart’s three-plus decades in management — on both the IndyCar/IMS side and the team side. Frye said the pair “hit it off,” which has led to the improvements this year.
“To me, I think singularly the best hire we’ve made in a long, long time has been that man,” Rahal said of Barnhart before the Sonsio Grand Prix, where he earned his second podium of the year. “I’ve absolutely loved having him. I’ve always been close to Brian, but we never worked together until this year.
“His calmness, the way he goes about his business — he’s a racer at heart. And at the end of the day, do we want to look at AI and we want to look at all this stuff, sure, but this is racing. You’ve got to race the race, and Brian does that tremendously well.”
Rahal and Barnhart displayed that ability to “race the race” in Detroit, where Chip Ganassi Racing’s Kyffin Simpson drove into Rahal’s rear on Lap 39 and spun the No. 15 around. Rahal methodically worked his way back to the front of the pack, avoided traffic ahead of him (like the incident between Will Power and Scott McLaughlin that Rahal described as “going 10 rounds with Tyson”) and found his way back on the podium amid the chaos.
“Those are the weekends you want,” Rahal said after the race. “If you want to be a contender — maybe not with Alex (Palou) because he’s in a league of his own — but if you want to be in a league with the rest of the guys, that’s what you need. The bad weekends need to be better. It didn’t feel great yesterday. We made some changes today, we had great race pace and it all came together. But 100%, we’ll take this.”
Barnhart’s ability to call shots and approach racing with a similar mindset to Rahal’s has led Rahal to having as many podium finishes this year as he did top-10 finishes in all of 2025.
“When you have a great racecar driver and a great strategist, if they don’t see eye to eye or they don’t fit, that might not necessarily work,” Frye said. “Well, in this case, it’s working and it’s working very well. So they’ve clicked from Day 1.”
Now, the goal is for Rahal to return to victory lane this year, which he hasn’t done since 2017. RLL’s last win came in 2023, when Lundgaard won on the streets of Toronto. Its only other win in the 2020s was Takuma Sato’s 2020 Indy 500 victory.
From 2015 to 2020, this team won at least one race every year (Rahal and Sato combined for nine wins in that time). Rahal has been the steadiest of the team’s three-car lineup of him, Louis Foster and Mick Schumacher this year.
“We’ve got a lot of reasons to be confident,” Rahal said. “We’ve got work to do, but the men and women in our shop should be very proud of what they’ve done, and we’re going to keep pushing them forward.
“The other thing, we’ve just got a great camaraderie there. It’s a great environment, and it’s a lot of good people. That stuff inspires me as a driver to keep pushing hard to try to give them the results that they deserve. I’m proud of that. We’re going to keep pushing.”
Frye feels that the key to continued success will be adding more of the right people going forward. He fixates on what he calls the “fit factor” of finding the right people — like Barnhart and Sagan — and putting them in the positions that work best within the team.
“We still have a ways to go,” Frye said. “We still need to improve in areas, but I think we’ve got a good foundation to go off of, and we’ve got some good momentum right now.”
Zion Brown is IndyStar’s motorsports reporter. Follow him at @z10nbr0wn. Get IndyStar’s motor sports coverage sent directly to your inbox with our Motor Sports newsletter. Subscribe to the YouTube channel IndyStar TV: IndyCar for a behind-the-scenes look at IndyCar and expert analysis.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Graham Rahal’s resurgence helped by former IndyCar president Jay Frye leading RLL