LEXINGTON, OH — Graham Rahal knew that his Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing team was improving. They know that they have strong pace on natural road courses. However, the Ohio native didn’t necessarily expect to be this strong on his hometrack on Saturday.

Rahal was only 19th quickest in practice on Friday. He turned that not only into a Fast Six appearance less than 24 hours later, but a front row starting spot at that.

“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.”

Rahal says that this feeling is one that he’s not had in a while. It’s been a long time since he’s had a car that he feels like he can drive it the way that he’d like to.

“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,” Rahal admitted.

“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.

“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 love the energy and momentum that this team has and wants to give them even more reason to celebrate with his second Mid-Ohio win on Sunday. It would equal as many wins as his dad has on this track, their home one, as on Sunday, he passed his father Bobby for most starts here too at 17-16.

“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 also 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.”

Now, it’s all about Sunday. He feels good about his chances as he said he was preparing his car to have to drive through the field again and now he doesn’t have to. He’s already there. While he was disappointed with Detroit and worried about the next race on a like track in Toronto, he wants to focus shortsighted now and enjoy this while he can.

“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.