Robert Woodward “Bobby” Rahal (born 10 January 1953) is an American former auto racing driver and team owner.
As a driver he won three championships and 24 races in the CART open-wheel series, including the 1986 Indianapolis 500. He also won the 2004 Indianapolis 500 as a team owner for the winning driver, Buddy Rice. Info from Wiki
Bio by Stephen Latham
After racing racing sports cars on American road circuits Bobby Rahal then spent many seasons competing in Europe (including a spell in F1) before returning to America. Contesting Indycar, he went on to be a three-time CART champion and won the Indianapolis 500 both as a driver and as a team owner. He also spent a brief time as a team principal in F1 and when Ferrari were considering an Indycar programme, Bobby was the man summoned to Maranello to discuss it with Enzo Ferrari himself.
Born in 1953, in Medina, Ohio, his father was a racer and from a young age Bobby’s summers were spent going to races with him and growing up in the culture of sports car racing. His father won his class at Sebring one year in a Porsche Carrera Six and at circuits he would see drivers such as P.Rodriguez, J.Siffert, B.Redman, V.Elford, B.McLaren, D.Hulme, J.Surtees and C.Amon, who he described as ‘his absolute heroes.’When he was 17, he raced his father’s Elva-Porsche in a novice race at Harewood, lapping everyone and later took a win at Mosport. After college, he raced his father’s Lola T290, and became his region’s SCCA Rookie of the Year in 1973
He then contested Formula Atlantic, performing well, and when he raced for March distributor Doug Shierson in 1975 he won the SCCA run-offs at Road Atlanta. There was a regular drive in 1976 and at Trois Rivières he outqualified Alan Jones, James Hunt and Patrick Tambay and was running second in the race until an engine mount snapped.
He stopped racing for a period due to being disillusioned and got a job but was soon lured back to racing, alongside Jim Morgan in Formula Atlantic. He was beaten to the championship by Gilles Villeneuve though finished ahead of Bill Brack and Keke Rosberg.
Coming to the attention of Walter Wolf, he was offered an F3 drive, with the possibility of some Grands Prix at the end of the year. During the year in F3 he qualified third at the Nurburgring and battled against Jan Lammers, who beat him to the flag. He qualified third at Monaco and despite losing second and top gears, the wet conditions helped overcome this problem and he finished fourth. In pouring rain at Monza he was sixth, and at the Osterreichring he was third and set an F3 lap record.
Then came the promised Formula 1 drives, in the US and Canadian GPs, alongside Jody Scheckter. At Watkins Glen he finished 12th though retired in Montreal after suffering fuel injection problems. However, at Montreal the car was badly damaged in practice but one of the previous season’s cars was on show at a local hotel to promote the race. The team took this car, put an engine in it overnight and made it raceworthy.
At this time he had secured a Formula 2 drive with Chevron, after managing to raise $100,000 for the drive with the team. After racing with them he received an offer to compete in Can-Am with Herb Kaplan’s Prophet-Chevrolet’s T330 Lola F5000. In the five races it was usually Bobby and Keke Rosberg on the front row but both had reliability problems and Bobby only won once, at Laguna Seca. While spectating at a sports car race at Mid Ohio, Brian Redman found him in the paddock and asked him to share Tony Cicale’s car, and they won the race.
During this time there was an F1 test with Arrows at Silverstone but after sliding off, his head hit a post hard enough to turn his helmet sideways and he was taken to hospital.
1980 saw him racing for Herb Kaplan again in Can-Am plus contest IMSA as team-mate to John Fitzpatrick in the Dick Barbour Porsche 935s. He also raced for Bob Garretson in a Porsche 935 in long-distance races and made his debut at Le Mans in 1980, driving for Dick Barbour Racing with B.Garretson and A.Moffatt. In 1981, Brian Redman raced with him and B.Garretson and they won the Daytona 24 Hours. Bob Garretson took the title, with Bobby third in the standings plus he joined Teo Fabi in Paul Newman’s Can-Am team for the last four races.
He was then approached by Jim Trueman, who had decided to build a CART team and wanted him to help find the people, cars and engines and set it up. It would be a steep learning curve and at Truesport’s first race, at Phoenix, nobody in the team had any oval experience. When asked by another team how much tilt they were running, they didn’t even know what tilt was. During the first pitstop the car caught fire and he jumped from the car with his racesuit burning; one of the Penske team in the next pit threw a bucket of water over him. Bobby admitted that although he had done Can-Am and Porsche 935s at Le Mans, the Indycar was the first car he had ever driven that never stopped accelerating, “You never ran up against that aerodynamic wall, it just kept on going faster.”
However, the team learned and persevered and he won Cleveland (as a rookie), plus took podiums at Michigan, Milwaukee, Pocono, Road America and another victory at Michigan, a high-banked oval. From a start up team, they progressed to second in the championship and Bobby was Rookie of the Year. There would be more victories over the coming seasons, finishing third in the series in 1984 and 1985. In 1984, the team were joined by Adrian Newey, who would later go on to work his design magic with McLaren, Williams and Red Bull in F1. Also in that year with Truesport, Bobby contested a NASCAR race, driving a Wood Brothers Ford in the Winston Western 500 at Riverside International Speedway.
Bobby Rahal. (part 2)
A highlight came with victory at Indianapolis in 1986 but it was tempered by the fact that Jim Truman was terminally ill with cancer. Although very weak, he watched the race from the pits and Bobby took the win for him; he sadly died 10 days later. Alongside the Indy 500, there were also victories in Toronto, Mid-Ohio, Montreal, Michigan and Laguna Seca and he clinched the title in the final race at Miami. He continued as he left off in 1987, taking seven podiums plus victories at Portland and Meadowlands and finally another title was his with a win at Laguna Seca.
During this period came the dialogue with Ferrari about a possible Indycar project. After discussions, a car was shipped to Maranello, with a skeleton crew to maintain it, and Bobby tested it at Fiorano. The car did eventually get built and would later be seen in the Ferrari museum.
He left Truesports and signed with Kraco Racing for 1989, only taking two victories in 1989 and 1991 at Meadowlands
though he finished second in the championship in 1991. In 1992, he and Carl Hogan went into partnership and formed their own team and at the season’s first race, at Phoenix, he led every lap. The year would see him win his third CART title after taking six podiums and wins at Phoenix, Detroit, New Hampshire and Nazareth. Eventually he bought out Carl Hogan and David Letterman came onboard as a minority shareholder.
In 1994 Bobby was instrumental in brining Honda into CART as an engine manufacturer though the partnership only lasted one racing year. Switching to an Ilmor-Mercedes engine, he finished third in the 1995 championship but was beginning to think about retireng as a driver, stating “you have to be honest with yourself. My goal was to be competitive right up to when I hung up my helmet, and racing against guys 20 years younger than me I did get on the podium in my last season, 1998.” His final race was at Fontana and the whole team wore Groucho Marx masks, with the big nose, bald head and glasses-Bobby joked “he could not think who they were all pretending to be.”
After retiring from driving, he continued as a team owner and had considerable success in the American Le Mans Series.
After Ford bought Jackie Stewart’s F1 team and branded it Jaguar, he was asked by Neil Ressler (Ford’s head of engineering) to be their team principal with in 2001. Unfortunately, or various reasons the liaison did not last but he later stated “People were very critical of Jaguar F1, but they had some good people. I loved the creativity of F1, and all they needed was some good leadership. I’m not saying we did everything right, but we were making progress.”
During the battle between CART and the IRL, Bobby became interim president and CEO of CART to try to help solve its problems. But, in 2004 he switched his team to the IRL and in that that year he won the Indy 500 as a team owner, when Buddy Rice scored Honda’s first Indianapolis victory.
His team won the 2010 GT team and manufacturers’ championships in the ALMS with BMW and took the top two places in 2011’s 12 Hours of Sebring.
In 2012, the team again won Sebring and finished second and third in the Team Championship and Manufacturer Championship. In 2013 the team’s BMW Z4s earned two wins, seven podium and four pole positions in the ALMS GT class en route to a second place rank in the Driver, Team and Manufacturer Championship.
Since 2014, they had 17 wins, 23 poles and 68 podiums plus were second in the Manufacturer, Team and Driver championships in 2015 and 2017. In 2018, they entered the world’s first production-based electric vehicle race series, the Jaguar I-PACE eTROPHY.
Besides his leadership of Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing, he was also the driving force behind a Legends of Motorsports historic racing series, operates a string of car dealerships, is President of the Road Racing Drivers Club, Chairman of the International Motor Racing Research Center Governing Council at Watkins Glen and is very active in the community through a Bobby Rahal Foundation.
Honours awarded included induction into the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America, the International Motorsports Hall of Fame and the Sebring Hall of Fame (all in 2004),the Canadian Motorsport Hall of Fame in 2010, the Sports Car Club of America Hall of Fame in 2013 and into the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Hall of Fame in 2014. The back straight leading up to the corkscrew at Laguna Seca was re-named Rahal straight.
He attends historic events and has a number of classic cars in his garage and he and son Jarrod entered a 1000-mile rally across Texas in my 3.0CSL BMW ‘Batmobile’. His son Graham is also a racing driver in the IndyCar Series.
Gallery SC and Indy 500 F Atlantic F2/F3 F1
