Bobby Rahal has his concession speech all prepared, but he’s in no hurry to deliver it.
The defending Indy-car champion’s crown is teetering and ready to fall as he heads into Sunday’s Texaco-Havoline 200 here at Road America, and if only he could figure whom to hand it to he might just relieve himself of the burden.
“The odds obviously are against us,” concedes Rahal, who sits a distant sixth in the point standings with series leader Nigel Mansell’s tailpipes barely visible over the horizon. “But stranger things have happened.”
It has already been a strange year, a wretched year, all in all, for Rahal, lowlighted by his failure to qualify for the Indianapolis 500. That embarrassment, oddly, also produced what the Glen Ellyn native considers the most uplifting event of his season.
“To me,” he says, “the highlight of the year was when in the midst of my greatest disappointment my sponsor, Miller, stepped up and said, `We were with you in the good times, and we believe in you.’ They extended my contract for two years when most companies would be heading for the exits.”
But a victory here Sunday would change a lot of things. Indeed, it would set the good times to rolling again as they did last year when, driving for his own newly formed race team, Rahal won four races and his third Indy-car title.
“For our year, obviously, it would be the highlight,” says Rahal. “Personally, for my career, it would mean a lot because this circuit has meant so much to me in my life. My father raced here for years in the ’50s. As a little boy, I remember going to Road America to watch the Can Am 500s.”
And as many boys do, Rahal dreamed of someday driving to victory at Road America. While most of his dreams have long since come true, this one has not. He has never won here in an Indy car.
“I should have won it in ’82, and I was leading in ’83 when I ran out of fuel,” he says. “I’ve won the pole twice. I still hold the record for the fastest lap here.”
And despite what has gone on before, whether you are referring to his record at Road America or his winless season, Rahal believes a victory Sunday is possible.
“We were the fastest car on the day we tested at Road America,” he says. “I think there’s a good chance for us to win a couple of times before the season is over.”
It would be fitting if Rahal were to win over the hills and dales of Road America, because he has been climbing uphill all season. He began by trying to defend his championship while developing a new chassis, and that effort ended in disaster with the failure at Indianapolis.
He still defends that decision.
“How do you know?” he asks. “You’ve got to try it. Yes, the results haven’t been what we wanted, but it’s important to know what your limitations are. I point out that Roger Penske tried for four years to build his own car and had to end up buying Marches. The best have tried and failed. If we had a fault, it was a fault of omission in the sense that we did not have a backup.”
After Indy, Rahal switched to a standard Lola at Milwaukee and has been doing much better.
“We’ve consistently been if not the quickest then in the top three of the Lola-Chevys,” he points out. “I don’t think anyone else-well, maybe Penske or Newman-Haas-they’re the only two teams that could switch horses in midstream and play catchup as quickly as we did.”
Rahal’s back in the mainstream, but don’t bet too heavily that he’ll stay there. Soon he will have to make a decision on next season, and while he concedes that he will not try to run his own chassis in 1994 his has been the test team for Honda’s developmental Indy-car engine, and he says it has performed well.
