ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Bobby Rahal was never happier to see a driver from another IndyCar team win a race.
Rahal, who was drinking a celebratory beverage long after Sunday’s Honda Grand Prix of St. Petersburg had concluded, was so happy he looked like his driver, Ryan Hunter-Reay, had driven to victory lane, not a driver from Newman/Haas/Lanigan Racing.
But there was a tremendous reason why Rahal, the three-time CART champion and 1986 Indianapolis 500 winner as a driver, was so happy.
The winner of Sunday’s speed fest through the streets of St. Petersburg was his 19-year-old son, Graham, who became the youngest winner of a major open-wheel race in history after winning in his very first IndyCar Series race.
“I don’t know that I expected him to win this year at all,” Bobby Rahal said. “I was hoping he would, but I didn’t expect him to because this is a tough crowd. It was a tough crowd in Champ Car when you had Will Power and Robert Doornbos and Sebastien Bourdais and Justin Wilson. Now, you multiply that with Scott Dixon and Dan Wheldon and Tony Kanaan.
“To win his first race and to win it pretty convincingly…this wasn’t won on a yellow or on a fuel-consumption race; it was won when it was time to go fast. He was the fastest guy on the track.”
The elder Rahal was pleased and proud and knew that the victory meant everything to his son, especially a week after he was forced to sit out the season-opening race at Homestead-Miami Speedway last week when he crashed during testing.
Graham’s team decided it was best to save his debut for the streets of St. Petersburg because it would be on familiar turf, the type of race course where he honed his skills in Champ Car Racing last year and in Formula Atlantic before that.
“He wants to race and he was not happy watching the Homestead race from the spotter’s stand,” Bobby Rahal said. “To come back from that to do this, he’s a lot stronger than I think because I still look at him and see a little kid. Mentally, he’s a very strong driver, for sure.”
At one point, Bobby Rahal’s driver, Hunter-Reay, was in second place late in the race behind Graham Rahal.
That set up an interesting scenario for the owner of Rahal Letterman Racing.
“We wanted to win with Ryan, but for another yellow he would have been there,” Bobby Rahal said of his driver. “We had to roll the dice if he was going to win or finish second. They cleaned that last accident up in record time.
“If that had taken another lap, we would have finished third. Ryan drove very well and deserved better than that.”
Rahal admitted he was watching both his driver and his son, even saying to himself, “Don’t hit each other” when the two were racing each other for the lead.
He has the famous last name, the lineage of a racing champion and he’s an American in a series that needs all the home-grown talent it can produce.
That’s a lot of responsibility for a kid who has friends back home in Ohio that are either flipping burgers at Wendy’s or in college looking for someone old enough to buy them beer.
“When I go home, I’m just another kid,” Graham Rahal said. “I really don’t talk about racing much when I’m around town. In New Albany, where I live, it’s nothing that I really ever talk about.
“I’m sure there are a lot of people when they walk around, especially kids in high school and stuff, that have seen me around. But everybody has always been respectful to me. It’s just not a topic of conversation when I go home. That’s something I always try to keep in mind. Trust me, if I didn’t, I’d hear it from my mom and dad and everyone else. That’s just the way it is.”