MADISON, Ill – Graham Rahal has scored a ton of top 10 finishes lately. In fact, he enters Saturday night’s race at the Gateway Motorsports Park with eight straight finishes inside of the top 10 and 10 in the last 11 overall.

He’s one top 10 shy though of tying a career high for a single season at 12. He accomplished that feat in each of the last two years. He has 11 already this season alone.

That sounds great right? Well for Rahal, it’s nice and all but frustrating in the same sense too. See, Rahal has just four top five results out of his No. 15 Honda all year though too. What’s keeping him from moving up just a few more positions in the finishing order when it’s all said and done?

“Just a lot of little bit is the problem,” Rahal said on Friday evening in Gateway. “That’s what’s been frustrating throughout the year – we haven’t really improved. That’s what’s disappointing. I gave that stat to Alex Rossi last week when we were coming home and he was shocked. I said yeah man we finished in the top 10 literally every race but two. The problem is we’re 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th all the time. We just need to keep working hard. It’s frustrating. I’m frustrated, the teams frustrated, the engineers are frustrated. We’ve been giving it our all.”

In Gateway, the site of this weekend’s race, he’s made two career starts on the 1.25-mile oval but his finishes were 12th and 10th respectively. He’s never led a lap on the St. Louis race track either. Furthermore, Rahal has led just nine laps all season.

In Iowa, he finished eighth but was a lap down. Iowa, is the only other short oval on the schedule. So a race win will be tough but his rise towards a top five or six in the points standings may not.

“I feel good about how competitive we should be at St. Louis,” said Rahal. “I think we had a lot of potential at Iowa; we were pretty strong and I think there is quite a lot that we can carry over from Iowa to St. Louis. We didn’t test there and some other teams did which might hurt us a little bit, but I think we should be able to go there and be pretty strong. We will do the best that we can for our sponsors, try to perform well and put a good show on for the fans, and Curtis (Francois) and his staff there that makes it happen. They do a great job.”

With all these good finishes, Rahal knows that they’re on the cusp of being an every week threat. Since the start of the 2018 season, only four teams have won multiple races – Rahal/Letterman/Lanigan Racing is one of them. Team Penske leads all teams with 14 victories. Andretti Autosport is second with seven trips to victory lane. Chip Ganassi Racing is third with five wins.

That’s 84-percent of the overall races being won by these three teams. They’ve won 26 of 31 races with this new car.

The best of the rest though is RLL. They’ve won one time in each of the last two years. But, if you want to broaden this scope of work, if you go back four years, RLL is still fourth among all teams with seven wins. Ganassi is only four wins ahead of them in third. Andretti, is just six wins ahead of them in second with 13.

See how close the gap really is.

Penske is the juggernaut with 37 wins. So, with how close that they are, what do they need to do to close that gap even further?

The team is interested in a third car. They haven’t ran that many cars since 2005 and 2006. In fact, after some lean years, the team scaled back from three cars to two and down to one full time entry for 2008. Then, they went part-time for the next three years after.

That led to slowly moving back up. Rahal, joined his family team in 2013 as a teammate to James Jakes. He had two top five finishes and five top 10’s in his first full season with RLL.

For 2014, they went with just Rahal as he had similar results but more of an understanding on what direction they needed to go. It paid off as they won twice in 2015 to go along with eight top five finishes and 10 top 10’s. They had another great year in 2016 with another trip to victory lane and eight top five 10’s, all eight being in the top five.

The problem with their new direction was, they needed help. After scaling back to one car, Rahal was having to do all the work. All the setups went through him. With only 45 minutes to an hour tops in each practice session throughout a race weekend, that’s a lot of setup chasing for one car. They always had said that they won’t add a second car for the sake of adding a second car. They needed the car to not take away from Rahal but to add to him.

So after a year of 2017 looking a lot like 2016 and 2016 looking a lot like 2015, they had hit the ceiling of one car – it was time for expansion.

Takuma Sato come onboard last year and it paid off. Rahal had 12 top 10 finishes. Sato, had a win, four top fives and eight top 10’s.

2019 has looked a lot like 2018, so would a third car now help? After all, Penske has three cars and Andretti four. Rahal, definitely think so, albeit he doesn’t feel like they’ve maximized the two cars quite yet though either.

“It would help,” said Rahal. “I don’t think we’ve been good enough as maximizing the two cars, to be honest. Something from even practice today, we were emphasizing, we need to divide and conquer. We show up to a racetrack every weekend, we have 20 different things to try. There’s no way that one car can get that done. We weren’t good enough before at just splitting that task up and staying committed to it, making it happen.

“This morning was definitely a really good improvement with that. So for sure three cars would be better. Trust me, every available driver in this pit lane has called me as if, like, I’m a decision maker. The door of my motorhome was like a round-robin coming in last week. What is going on here?

“Yeah, that’s not my department. It would be good if we can figure it out.”

Rahal, says that if a third car doesn’t pan out, he’d be interested in this team finding an alliance like the one Harding has with Andretti Autosport.

“As you guys know, what has worked well and will continue to work well, these partnerships, as long as IndyCar allows it, doesn’t crack down on it, these partnerships like a Harding and Andretti, which is really just Andretti all the way around, what it’s allowed them to do is like Colton could come here and test last week because he’s not considered Andretti, while the Andretti cars were out in Portland testing. They can double up on their data and testing, which we cannot do. We weren’t able to test at either place because of the way our testing rules are. We need to look at partnerships like that, too, because that’s a big benefit. Until they crack down on it, that’s a big benefit.”

Meyer Shank Racing, an Ohio based team like RLL, would make the most sense as they were aligned with Arrow Schmidt Peterson Motorsports before SPM has switched to an alliance with McLaren Racing and Chevrolet power for 2020. That leaves MSR searching.