Touron pairs up with Rahal as race engineer for 2025 IndyCar season
Yesterday at 02:45 PM
Graham Rahal's odds of returning to victory lane have improved with the signing of Yves Touron as race engineer for the No. 15 Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing Honda.
Regarded as one of the paddock's best-kept secrets, Touron joins RLL after serving as Juncos Holling Racing's technical director, and previous stops include the former KV Racing team, Dreyer & Reinbold Racing and Carlin Motorsports. The Frenchman also spent time in IMSA at multiple teams, which complements RLL's dual participations in IndyCar and the WeatherTech SportsCar Championship.
With Rahal aching to end a winless streak that dates back to June of 2017 at Detroit, his pairing with Touron has great potential to move the veteran forward in the championship standings.
"I really like a new challenge," Touron told RACER. "I've known some people here at Rahal, and so I’ve been in contact with them. At Juncos, I was technical director, but I felt like the opening and the opportunity to join Rahal as race engineer was exciting. That’s why I accepted that position, and working with Graham is going to be nice. Being race engineer or technical director, for me, it is still technical. I've always been involved in development, and that makes it interesting for me."
Rahal is coming off a 2024 season during which he underwent a mid-year race engineering change to the promising but inexperienced first-timer Ashley Higham, and finished 18th in the championship. Higham, who was praised by Rahal for how he handled the step up to the top-tier engineering role after the season began, has moved across to the No. 30 Honda with Devlin DeFrancesco.
For Rahal, whose IndyCar driving career is expected to wind down in the coming years, the onboarding of Touron speaks to a win-now approach being taken by the team he might lead in the near future.
"I was really interested in working Graham; he's one of top drivers and been in racing for a long time, and I'm really looking forward to that," Touron said. "I like working with a seasoned driver; working with someone like Oriol Servia was that way. Those very experienced drivers are so good."
Touron lands with RLL at an important time. Having undergone constant change in its engineering department, bringing in a proven veteran whose technical director-level skills extend to all areas of vehicular performance fills an acknowledged void. The team moved fellow engineering veteran and Indy 500 winner Todd Malloy over from its factory BMW IMSA GTP program last season to act as its IndyCar technical director, and with Touron in the mix as a new ally, RLL bolsters its engineering corps in ways that should help to elevate the entire effort.
"Looking at what the team has built here from an outside perspective, and going into that part of the of team, I'm like the kid in the candy store,” Touron said. "There’s a lot of opportunities, a lot of development. It's a bigger team than I’m used to, so for sure, it’s going to take a bit to get acclimated to that kind of environment, but it’s something I am really happy to jump into. The main focus for me is to do good with Graham, and get him up there and do our best and succeed."
