Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing comes to this weekend’s Honda Indy Toronto (1:30 p.m. ET, Peacock, INDYCAR Radio Network) with some recently found momentum. While Mid-Ohio is a race that certainly could have gone a little bit better, it’s one that they at least say that they showed up with speed again.

Christian Lundgaard kept his customary pace on natural road courses with his fifth top 10 finish of the season, four of which on like tracks. He’s qualified sixth and finished there in Barber, he was on the pole at Indy and finished fourth. The sophomore Dane started seventh and finished there in Road America and came from fifth to finish fourth in Mid-Ohio.

“We’ve gotten to the point now where once we have a package that’s fast, we just try to execute,” Lundgaard said. “Luckily in my position we were on the Honda Vivid 45 car, but on the 15 car they weren’t so lucky with the pit stops. We’re making progress for sure. Looking forward to see how we’ll do in Toronto.”

Graham Rahal nabbed a front row start on his home track but was plagued by pit stop troubles on both stops. That dropped him to seventh at the end.

Win as a team and lose as a team Rahal said afterwards. However, a day before, he was singing praises and saying that this is the best he’s felt entering a race day in a long time.

“Yeah, really nice for the team. It’s been a long time coming,” Rahal said on RLL’s pace qualifying pace at Mid-Ohio. “We’ve been beat up. We’ve been bruised. We’ve been knocked down. For us as a team to rebound this way…

“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.”

This was a rebound from the Month of May oval struggles which saw RLL qualify 3 of their 4 cars and all 3 would start in the bottom 4 spots. For the second consecutive year, they also had 2 cars on the last row.

Rahal was bumped by teammate Jack Harvey.

The team made some internal changes afterwards for which that, plus all this work on development the road course car is paying off.

“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,” Rahal said.

“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.”

The question now is, does Toronto force them to go backwards or can they use this as a springboard to further propel them down the line?

It’s no secret that the street course program is lacking in comparison to the natural road courses. They finished 6-9-22 in St. Pete, 12-13-14 in Long Beach and 16-17-25 in Detroit.

“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,” Rahal also admitted in Mid-Ohio. “But the road course package, you look at Indy GP, you look Road America, and you look here, and we’ve been competitive.”

Lundgaard doesn’t share the same outlook as Rahal though noting that he feels like he can be strong on the Canadian streets this weekend.

“Honestly, I do think that we’re going to have a fast car,” he says. “We made a lot of progress going into that weekend last year. I think at the time in the season it was my best qualifying result, and I think at the time as well, it was the best finish we had that year up until that point.

“Just thinking about that, I think, we knew that we were making progress that part of the year of last year, and already now, we’ve seen an increase in performance early in the season. We outperformed ourselves compared to last year in Mid-Ohio. So we just need to stay on that trajectory.

“I think going into Toronto, it’s very important that we keep our head cool and kind of focus on our own stuff. Then I guess we’ll have to wait and see, but I do think we can come away with at least a match of a fourth or potentially even a podium.”

As far as why his views are different and why he’s faring better results wise than his two teammates, Lundgaard thinks that it’s because of his vast array of cars that he’s driven overseas and the evolution of them has given him experience from every which way that he can.

“I think, because I’m so young and I’ve driven a lot of cars in Europe that’s, in my opinion, quite difficult to drive and I’ve also driven some easy ones and just my experience with the F1 team back in a few years ago when I was doing a lot of simulator work, you’re just very involved and you drive a lot of different cars, a lot of different — I wouldn’t necessarily just call it setups, but the evolution of different cars, and you understand the differences and how you need to drive certain cars,” he says.

“I wouldn’t say you develop the skill, but you sort of do. You just get a better understanding, and you improve your talent. I guess that’s why on certain occasions Graham will complain more about the car than I will because we kind of just get on with it.

“We saw the car this weekend was in a good window for him at Mid-Ohio, and he was fast. There’s no question that Graham is a good driver, same for Jack, but I just think I can do things they can’t do just because of my previous experiences.”

Which his why despite RLL expected to possibly struggle over the next four races, Lundgaard is more confident than his teammates are heading into them.

You have Toronto this weekend, a doubleheader in Iowa next followed by Nashville the first weekend of August.

On ovals this year, granted they were superspeedways, RLL finished 18-19-24 and 18-19-33.

Lundgaard though, feels like the momentum is there still and that most of these tracks at the end of the schedule are perfect places to finish even further up than they did a year ago.

“Honestly, right now obviously we’re optimistic, leaving Mid-Ohio,” he told me. “I think last year the best car qualified 13th, which was just not transferring from the first qualifying group. This year we had two cars in the Fast Six and one on the Front Row and me in 5th, and we had Jack up in 11th as well.

“Just looking at that specific race from last year to this year, we moved a lot, and we really struggled at Mid-Ohio last year. Now we’re coming into a track where we didn’t necessarily struggle as much, but we built a good foundation for Nashville at Toronto last year, and we were very competitive at Nashville.

“So coming in here, I do think, just looking at that, that it is sort of a turning point, at least I hope so. We want to continue building on what we’re building on now and basically don’t really leave those performances.”

RLL was able to pick up test days recently in Sebring and at Iowa too. It was the Sebring test a year ago for which propelled them forward. Does the Iowa one this year do the same?

In 2022, in the same street races preceding Toronto, RLL finished 7-11-13 in St. Pete, 7-15-18 in Long Beach and 14-15-26 in Belle Isle. They went to work at Sebring in the middle of the summer to help them learn for Toronto and Nashville.

It paid off.

RLL went 4-8-19 in Toronto and 8-10-23 in Nashville.

Rahal went on a nice run to end the season with 5 top 10’s over the final 8 races including a pair of top five results. He had 4 top 10’s in the previous 9 with a best finish of 7th in that span.

Lundgaard also had 5 top 10 finishes in the same final 8 races including a pair of top five finishes too but one of those was a runner-up result on the Indy road course. That’s the same place he just earned a pole at a couple of months ago and remember, we go back next month. He had 2 top 10 finishes in the first 9 races.

3 of the final 4 races this season are on natural road courses which are their strengths. If they’re stronger on these tracks this year compared to last and can get momentum rolling further and further, watch out.

This could be a sleeper team to watch the rest of the way.

“Luckily, we have another Indy GP later this year, in August, and we’ve been competitive there. I had my first podium, had my first pole there, so I might as well get my first win at the speedway,” Lundgaard says. “I really do think that we have that opportunity at that race. We just need to nail it during that weekend.

“Again, there might be other opportunities. We know we’ll be strong at the two road courses at the end of the year, and I do think we’ll be strong at Nashville as well. We just need to figure Iowa and St. Louis out, and I think we can at least finish around sixth or seventh in the championship if we really do things well.

“I’m definitely hoping for a podium, definitely hoping for a win. We’ve come close a couple of times this year. So I’m definitely hoping we get to that.”

Lundgaard feels the comfort in the series now too.

“I’d say I was pretty much comfortable as soon as I basically — I mean, last year we saw certain tracks where it took me a while to just figure stuff out, but I would say this year we’ve been fast in pretty much all Practice 1 sessions,” he noted to me.

“To me that just indicates I’ve been to all these tracks now. I’m comfortable in the team. I’m comfortable in the series. I’m comfortable in the car. I didn’t really need to go out early in the session just to run laps. We’re actually going out straight away with our run plan and not having to deal with all the trying to figure stuff out.

“I guess to really answer your question, I’m very comfortable in the car. I know exactly what I need, exactly what I want, and that’s where the three drivers come in, where it’s tougher for a team to fix and get a car that fits three different driving styles.”