2025 IndyCar season outlook: Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing

Today at 10:30 AM

With the first practice session of the new IndyCar Season due to begin at St. Petersburg on Friday, Feb. 28, it's time to start ramping up for the launch with a look inside each of the 11 teams.

What's new, what's different, and what has stayed the same? We'll find out from each team, continuing after PREMA Racing with Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing.

2024 ACHIEVEMENTS

To understand where RLL is starting in 2025, let's begin with a look back to where it ended in 2024.

•  Drivers' championship: Graham Rahal, No. 15 Honda, 18th place. Zero wins/poles/top threes/top fives, five top 10s, two races led for seven laps, running at the finish of 14 out of 17 races. Average starting position of 17.1, average finish of 15.1.

• Drivers' championship: Pietro Fittipaldi, No. 30 Honda. 19th place. Zero wins/poles/top threes/top fives/top 10s, one race led for two laps, running at the finish of 12 out of 17 races. Average starting position of 21.1, average finish of 19.6.

• Drivers' championship: Christian Lundgaard, No. 45 Honda, 11th place. Zero wins/poles, one top 3, one top 5, five top 10s, four races led for 53 laps, running at the finish of 16 out of 17 races. Average starting position of 14.5, average finish of 13.0.

• Entrants' championship: No. 15, 18th (earned a Leaders Circle contract), No. 30 22nd (earned a Leaders Circle contract), No. 45 11th (earned a Leaders Circle contract).

2025 DRIVERS

• No. 15 Honda: Graham Rahal

• No. 30 Honda: Devlin DeFrancesco

• No. 45 Honda: Louis Foster (rookie)

2025 KEY POSITIONS

• Team owners: Bobby Rahal, David Letterman, Mike Lanigan

• COO: Steve Ericksen

• VP of Operations: Derek Davidson

• Team Manager: Grant Weaver

• Head of Race Engineering: Todd Malloy

• No. 15 Race Engineer: Yves Touron

• No. 15 Race Strategist: Tisch Akulich

• No. 15 Chief Mechanic: TJ Thompson

• No. 30 Race Engineer: Ashley Higham

• No. 30 Race Strategist: Ben Seigel

• No. 30 Chief Mechanic: Isaac Sanchez

• No. 45 Race Engineer: Daniele Cucchiaroni

• No. 45 Race Strategist: Jarret Schalch

• No. 45 Chief Mechanic: Thomas Semik

MAJOR CHANGES

• Coming off of another disappointing season, RLL looks incredibly different from how it ended 2024. Two of its three drivers are new. Two of its three race engineers are new or reassigned. Two of its chief mechanics are new.

• Top performer Christian Lundgaard left and signed with Arrow McLaren.

• Signed reigning Indy NXT champion Louis Foster to replace Lundgaard.

• Newcomer Pietro Fittipaldi was not re-signed; he's moved to IMSA's LMP2 class with the Pratt Miller Motorsports team.

• Signed two-year Andretti Global driver Devlin DeFrancesco to replace Fittipaldi.

• Moved Indy 500-winning engineer Todd Malloy, who was dedicated to the team's BMW IMSA GTP program coming into 2024, into its overarching IndyCar engineering role halfway through the season and has kept him in the position for 2025.

• Signed Juncos Hollinger Racing technical director Yves Touron to engineer Rahal.

• Rahal's race engineer Ashley Higham moved to engineer DeFrancesco.

• Fittipaldi's race engineer Daniele Cucchiaroni moved to engineer Foster.

• Named renowned IndyCar veteran Grant Weaver as team manager.

THE MISSION AHEAD IS TO…

Improve as a complete team. The last two seasons have been a case of one driver being a competitive outlier — Lundgaard — and the other two cars being magnets for misfortune or largely invisible. In 2023, Lundgaard was eighth to Rahal's 15th while Jack Harvey was nowhere in the third car. In 2024, the team slid to 11th with Lundgaard and Rahal fell a similar amount to 18th; Fittipaldi was 19th in the third car.

Losing Lundgaard is exactly that, a loss, and if RLL's going to have a fighting chance, it will need Rahal to produce at the highest level since 2021 when he was seventh in the championship. Foster, who's immensely talented, is a rookie and that means he'll have some considerable highlights and some lowlights in a year where it's unreasonable to expect him to match what Lundgaard brought to the team.

And after a year away, DeFrancesco is back in the series, which is great for him — he never wanted to leave — and having placed 23rd and 22nd in his two seasons with Andretti, he has an opportunity to show he's better than his record.

RLL has been on a rollercoaster of fortunes in recent years. Its engineering group went through constant change, it's cycled through plenty of drivers, and it dealt with two years of missed targets at the Indy 500. We'll ignore that visit by the FBI in the offseason because it's had no bearing on the team's efforts to go racing in 2025.

But what has happened during the long break since Nashville is the adding of many engineers to the team and fortification of its performance side under the direction of Todd Malloy. There's also a general sense that the hard times are in the past; it's amazing how important a positive mindset can be to changing a team's direction.

Will RLL knock down the most competitive teams? No, that's too much to ask in such a short period of time. But Rahal, and Foster, could form a promising combo, and DeFrancesco is motivated to rewrite his story. Rather than finding themselves in a familiar position of trying to react to last year's problems, I get the sense that RLL is doing its best to make a fresh start. Where that leaves them in the championship standings is impossible to predict, but there's a reason to hold judgment until this reimagined group goes racing for a few months and finds out where they belong in the pecking order.

Rahal's Main Task: Channel his inner guru, plus the age-old note about improving his qualifying performances.

Rahal did have some great Saturdays last season and also had more than his fair share of engine penalties and losses of grid positions, but there were also too many days where he'd qualify a distant 19th or 22nd and have the impossible task of constantly charging though the field to get up to where he should have started.

Rahal remains one of IndyCar's best race-day performers, but Lord, imagine if he didn't have more than half the field to pass and how that would improve his average finishing position and place in the championship. His new race engineer Yves Touron is a beast who should elevate Rahal's output in every way. If they connect, the No. 15 car should come to life.

He's also the lone RLL driver with a large volume of experience, chassis knowledge, a deep base of technical expertise to lead the team. That's different from what RLL had with Rahal and Lundgaard contributing to the team's debrief sessions. And now, with two young and inexperienced teammates, Rahal's the old head, again, and needs to mentor Foster and DeFrancesco. That's where the guru part comes in.

To give himself the best chances of success — even if one of the young guns ends up beating him — Rahal needs to embrace the role of team leader/veteran and guide Foster and DeFrancesco to deliver what RLL needs to be a stronger organization.

DeFrancesco's Main Task: Play the long game. Too many of DeFrancesco's races with Andretti followed the same script: Charge like hell during the first stint, cook the tires prematurely and fall back, or pit in a good position and make a mistake that ruins the rest of the race. Zoom forward, then disappear.

If there's one new trick to show with RLL, it's how DeFrancesco — who has skill and speed — can run clean and smooth from start to finish. It might not be sexy to start 18th and finish 16th, but it's better than firing up to 12th, tripping over someone, and crossing the line in 22nd.

There's a better version of DeFrancesco than was shown at Andretti. Wherever he finds himself in the running order, embracing consistency is the first order of business.

Foster's Main Task: Don't let the hype derail his season. Everybody who watched Foster in Indy NXT knew he was a special talent, and everybody inside RLL is impressed by what they've seen so far. The same can be said of Linus Lundqvist, who shined on a number of occasions with Ganassi — the best team in the series last year — with a pole and two podiums. But Foster isn't driving for that team.

So, despite the prodigious skills, he can't led undue internal pressure build to try and become RLL's new Lundgaard. Foster will do some remarkable things as a rookie, but I'm most looking forward to seeing what he can do next year.

GOALS

"Graham in the top 10, because I think he has the ability to do that," Bobby Rahal told RACER. "Would it be nice to have a win or two? Yeah, maybe three. It’s so competitive but let’s face it, the big thing is you gotta qualify towards the front; more importantly, you have to finish towards the front every race, no matter where you qualify. And that’s strategy, that’s reliability, that’s pace.

"I think Devlin has shown he’s had pace, and obviously qualified well with the Indy GP a few years ago. I think more than anything, it’s about giving him a car that he likes and putting him in an environment that really, really encourages him, rather than discourages him. With Louis, I think it may take a couple races to get fully going, but he’s the diamond in the rough, right? I mean, he’s the guy that all you need to do is polish that a little bit and get a few good races under his belt and I think he’s going to be strong. I think by midseason, he could be in the top 10s."

MORE THOUGHTS FROM TEAM OWNER BOBBY RAHAL:

"I think the most obvious thing is we have maturity in the engineering department, and what I would maybe describe as successful maturity with the likes of Todd Malloy and Yves Touron," Rahal said.

"I feel good about our potential for this year, having guys like Grant Weaver — tons of experience, managing the shop floor — freeing up time for Derek Davidson to do his role more efficiently and more thoroughly, only because he’s not inundated with so many of the things that team managers have to deal with.

"Between the two of them, I really feel good about our shop floor, our mechanics and all the people that are doing work behind the scenes. Graham is still the leader. We have two relatively inexperienced people, although Devlin did a nice job testing at Sebring. He’s not that inexperienced, but I think he’s already in an environment where he feels very, very good about what he can do. And then with Louis, he's got a lot on his plate, but I do know that both Devlin and Graham will do everything they can to help him come to the grips with it as quickly as possible.

"I mean, hey, it’s going to be tough, right? It’s always tough. But I really do feel that we’re better prepared for this season than we have been in several years."