LEXINGTON, OH — Graham Rahal noted that midseason changes in the NTT INDYCAR SERIES doesn’t typically lend a helping hand for immediate success. However, a pair of drivers who’ve had changes made on their cars will lead the field to green in Sunday’s Honda Indy 200 (1:30 p.m. ET, NBC, INDYCAR Radio Network).

Colton Herta (1:06.3528-seconds) narrowly beat Graham Rahal by just .0432-seconds on Saturday in rural Ohio to score his 11th career NTT INDYCAR SERIES pole. He does so amid changes made to his 26 team between this race at Mid-Ohio and the last one two weeks ago in Road America.

In that race weekend, Herta also won the pole too. A day later, Herta had the race won as well. He led 33 laps on the day and pit for the final time with 15 laps remaining. It was one lap too early, however. The rest of the field pit one lap later and had enough fuel to go to the end without having to save.

Herta didn’t have that luxury. He had to fuel save which is why it not only took him out of winning contention, it took him off the podium too. He’d finish fifth.

In the off week, Andretti Autosport made changes…again. Herta gained his third race strategist of the season with Rob Edwards and Scott Harner swapping spots. Harner to Devlin DeFrancesco and Edwards to Herta.

This one though, is already paying off.

“It’s not how I would like to do it. You would want an off-season to prepare with one person, and unfortunately I never got that,” said Herta.

“It’s nice that they’re open and willing to making changes, and they take everybody’s feedback, and they look it over. They truly want everybody on the team to do their best, so they want to win, and they know it’s not an ideal situation.

“We obviously have the speed, and we just need to put together some race weekends as a whole. Hopefully we can do that. Obviously it’s been a struggle to do that pretty much all year. It’s pretty frustrating to be sitting here and having a best result of fourth and not really getting an opportunity at a podium.

“I’m happy that Rob is here. Like he’s been really good with me on the radio. But it’s not how he is on the radio. It’s all about strategy and what we can do with that.

“That’s the most important bit.”

Herta played it coy on if the Road America debacle was the culprit of the swap, but if you look at what Michael Andretti said following Romain Grosjean’s pole in St. Pete this past March and culminate that with what transpired the last time out, I’d say Road America had a lot to do with it.

“I mean we did have many races where we had very fast cars last year, but we tended to do something wrong, shoot ourselves in the foot one way or another,” said team owner Michael Andretti said back in March after a pole in St. Pete. “That’s another thing we’ve really studied and worked on. Hopefully our pit stops will be better and strategies will be better.

“We really worked on trying to be a lot more detail-oriented, things like that.

“I hope it pays off.”

So far, it’s not. Hence another change.

“I think it had a little bit, but for that stuff, they’re obviously pretty critical on strategists after every race when they’re going over everything and they have their meetings and I’m sure they get drilled pretty good in those meetings if they make a wrong decision, said Herta on Saturday.

“But it’s tough. It’s just like the drivers; you’ve got to do it, and you’ve got to do it every time, and if you can’t, it sucks, but that’s the way it is.”

For Graham Rahal, they’ve made a host of changes too over there at Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing. They struggled at Indy for which Rahal was the lone driver bumped from the field. As a result, some internal changes happened. For the second consecutive year, two RLL drivers lined up on the last row at Indy and one car went home.

“There’s been a few changes. Fundamentally there were things that needed to happen,” said Rahal. “As I keep saying, we’re finally being rewarded for the changes. It’s hard to make those mid-season. It’s factual. It’s hard to make a change and immediately see a result. It’s not typical, but we had a lot of good people that I think were being held back a little bit.

“Once we started to unleash them a little bit to realize their full potential, it benefitted the entire program, and so we’re starting to see that, at least on road courses.

“We don’t know what the street course in Toronto is going to present us. Iowa, I think our race car in Iowa is going to be very strong, and we typically are. I’m worried about qualifying there for sure based on the test, so we still have some improvements to make there, but we’re starting to see it. We’re going down the right path finally.”

That’s why Rahal said that it feels good to be this close to scoring that pole.

“I thought we were going to get him there. I knew it was a solid lap,” he said. “But man, I was just walking up the stairs wondering where four/hundredths is. But at the same time that’s INDYCAR racing today. I think the top four of us were only separated by less than a tenth. It’s unbelievable.

“It’s great to be in the front row. Obviously great job to Honda. We’re here for the Honda Indy 200, for them to sweep the Fast Six in their background, and for us, for Fifth Third bank, a Cincinnati based company for our team, for everything else, for me, this is a big day.

“It feels really good. I’m excited for what tomorrow has in store. Hopefully Mother Nature is nice to us and we can go battle, because I do actually feel that our race pace may be a little better that I expected out of qualifying, so I’m excited.”

Rahal was joined up front by his teammates. Christian Lundgaard starts fifth in his No. 45 Dallara-Honda. Jack Harvey starts 12th.

Lundgaard has qualified sixth, first, seventh and now fifth on natural road courses this season. Harvey has his second-best start behind being fourth at Indy.

“Yeah, really nice for the team. It’s been a long time coming,” Rahal said on RLL’s pace on Saturday. “We’ve been beat up. We’ve been bruised. We’ve been knocked down. For us as a team to rebound this way, I could have told you last night after the practice, yeah, I was P20, but I told everybody I don’t think that’s real at all.

“And I told the guys in the engineering room I said, actually I think I’ve got P2, P3 pace and I don’t normally say that unless I’m fairly confident that we do. This morning we went out, ran only one set of blacks, we’re right there.

“So, yeah, I felt good. To be honest with you, this is the first weekend I felt like I’ve had the car to where I can drive it the way I want to drive it, and it’s rewarded me because finally — like this isn’t a long year, and it’s finally to the place I can charge the entries, I can do the things that I like to do with my style, and it’s just nice to finally see the result come.

“It almost feels in a weird way like today you don’t have to drive nearly as hard as you were the last two years combined. You knew the speed was there. You weren’t over by pressuring yourself. You just simply needed to work through it and get there.

“It certainly was nice to see the result, as I said, for the whole team.

“It’s much nicer to — as I said, to be able to drive the car the way I want to. I felt like the last few years, it’s just not to my style. I think Christian has done a great job because he’s more tolerant of the oversteer slides on entry and things like that, and for me, my style, I want to attack the corner. I want to brake late, brake hard, roll speed with good, good rear confidence, and I’ve struggled with that mightily. This is the first weekend I’ve felt like, finally.

“Even looking at my notes from here last year to my notes from this weekend, completely different. I mean, completely — obviously we qualified like 18th last year, so it’s clear. But it’s been nice.”

Rahal isn’t necessarily shocked to be this strong though. He said the turnaround has been coming, which is a byproduct of these changes.

“Detroit was a major disappointment, which worries me a little for Toronto because I think there’s still a lot of questions for us on our street course package, but the road course package, you look at Indy GP, you look Road America, and you look here, and we’ve been competitive,” he notes.

“Again, it’s good to see that, good to feel the energy, feel the momentum.

“I think we’re finally starting to make changes with the car, as I just said, that they’re responding the right way, the way you’d expect them to, and it’s nice. It’s nice to feel that.

“More than me, I think it’s just for these guys, to see the smiles on the mechanics’ faces, those guys, they’ve never had an ounce of quit in them, and they could have for years. To see them excited is worth it.”

Rahal says that Saturday was redemption and gratification to show the world that he can still do this.

“I think I’ve joked with you guys many times, but while most of the world probably thought I forgot how to drive or could never drive, that’s not the reality. Today is just a nice day to remind people. It’s easy to forget,” he said.

“But INDYCAR racing is the most competitive form of motorsport in the world. It’s the most demanding form of motorsport on the teams, the drivers, utilize the resources that you have, which is minimal, and the teams do make sure that you’re on your game at all times.

“So on a day like today, it certainly is rewarding when you can see all of those things come together finally, and it’s not that I needed reminded to myself because I’ve seen it, I know it, I know I can do it, but it’s nice for everybody to see once again that it takes the full package here to run up front and to win all the time.

“I mean, Alex Palou is probably the best guy in the series at this standpoint, but he also has a damned good car. You’ve got to put those pieces of the puzzle together to run up front, and I feel like we’re getting better. We are finding our way, and that’s all we can do.”