Christian Lundgaard was right. He didn’t share the same thoughts that Graham Rahal did on the prospects of RLL having a strong weekend in Toronto.

Rahal said after his second place start two weeks ago in Mid-Ohio, that he felt like this would be a tough weekend for the Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing camp in Toronto. Despite this being a turning point for this organization last year, the organization struggled largely in the last street course race at Detroit back in June.

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“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.”

It’s no secret that the street course program for RLL 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.

However, Lundgaard didn’t share Rahal’s outlook. In fact, it was quite the opposite.

“Honestly, I do think that we’re going to have a fast car,” he said on Wednesday of this week. “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 were different and why he’s faring better results wise than his two teammates, Lundgaard thought 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.”

Mic drop on Saturday. In the rain, Rahal qualified last (27th). Jack Harvey was in 19th. Lundgaard?

Pole.

Rahal has qualified 20th, 24th, 27th and 27th on street races. Harvey 19th, 15th, 25th and 19th.

Lundgaard is sticking out and one that’s thriving where his teammates are struggling.

“I think when I woke up this morning, I was just hoping we were going to make improvements from yesterday, from 17th yesterday,” he said. “To end the day like this I didn’t quite expect, but RLL has just been smashing it, quite honestly.

“I know the past few race weekends we’ve been moving forward, and we’ve been making progress on the shoulder as well from my test at Iowa.

“Let’s just see what the rest of the season brings. It starts well now, so we’ll keep moving.”

He credits this pole in the wet to his European background, just as he said a few days prior.

“When we grew up in mini-karts, in Denmark we don’t have wet tires, and as we all know, we develop our skills when we are in a very young age,” he said.

“I was driving around on the slicks in the wet, and I’ve just always been fast in the wets. Especially in go-karts. Yeah, I guess it comes from there.”

However, he’s not so optimistic about a win in Sunday’s Honda Indy Toronto (1:30 p.m. ET, Peacock, INDYCAR Radio Network).

“I do think we will be fast tomorrow. I just don’t think we’ll be the fastest car,” he said. “I don’t think we’ve shown that pace throughout the weekend.

“I hope the improvements that we did make from practice 2 into qualifying and the changes that we made will pay off tomorrow.”

He’s not wrong in that aspect.

MORE: What’s at stake for Sunday’s Honda Indy Toronto

Penske and Ganassi have combined to have won 7 of the last 8 street course races and 13 of the last 19 of them in general. Only Andretti Autosport (4 wins) and Arrow McLaren Racing (1 win) have won in this span.

With Penske and Ganassi having won five straight Honda Indy Toronto’s and combining for 5 of the 9 podiums this season on street courses and have won 8 of 9 races this season, it may be a race between these two on Sunday.

They have 4 of the top 7 starters including 2 of the top 4.

Ganassi is 2-for-3 on street courses this season and also won the final two races of them last year to give them 4 wins in the last 5 tries.

While Team Penske won the 1st three street races last year, Ganassi was next best in class on these circuits with finishes of 2-8-9-23 at St. Pete, 3-6-20-22 in Long Beach and 3-6-7-22 in Detroit.

Penske started off 3-for-3 with 3 different drivers on street courses in 2022, but have since gone 0-for-5. In just 2 of the last five, they had the second-place finisher.

They went 9-10-15 in Toronto and 2-6-11 in Nashville a year ago.

This year, they went 7-13-17 in St. Pete, 6-9-10 in Long Beach and 2-7-10 in Detroit.

That’s just two podiums in the last five tries after having three straight wins. Can they make up for it in Toronto, a place where they’ve won 3 of the last 5 races here or do they slip further back?

The only other teams up front are RLL (Lundgard, 1st), Arrow McLaren Racing (O’Ward 3rd, Rosenqvist 5th) and Andretti Autosport (Kirkwood 8th, Grosjean 9th). Even if you go back to 11th, you have another Ganassi driver (Marcus Armstrong) in 10th and the final Penske driver (Josef Newgarden) in 11th.

But, with factoring in Andretti and McLaren, that’s 10 of the top 11 starters. They also went 1-12 on Friday.

Since 2022, these four have won all 27 races and if you go back to 2021, they’ve won 37 straight. Furthermore, in this Aeroscreen era (57 races), they’ve won 94.7% (54-for-57) of them.

The last non “Big 4” team to win was Meyer Shank Racing in 2021. In fact, these teams didn’t win the Month of May at all with Ed Carpenter Racing’s Rinus VeeKay winning the GMR Grand Prix and Helio Castroneves the Indy 500.

The only other time they didn’t win was the 2020 Indy 500 with RLL and Takuma Sato.

That’s it.

The separation is real. You have the top 2, the next two, then the rest.

Penske has won 22 times. Ganassi has won 21. Andretti has won 7 and McLaren 4. The other teams are RLL, ECR and MSR each with 1.

Which is why Lundgaard is hopeful more of a strong finish rather than focusing on the race win itself.

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.

They’re stronger everywhere already this season for the most part which with what Rahal says vs. what Lundgaard said, who’s right?

So far, it’s Lundgaard.