Why Jay Frye used Al Pacino's speech to set tone for Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing
ELKHART LAKE, Wis. — Though they ultimately weren't left kissing the bricks as they'd hoped, and as it appeared they very well might be part way through this year's Indianapolis 500, Jay Frye felt he and his Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing team had built some noted momentum coming out of the Month of May unlike RLL had experienced since it's victory in 2020.
Weeks into his tenure as the team's new president, a role Frye took over mid-April at the Long Beach Grand Prix, Frye, the old Missouri tight end and offensive tackle sat the team down and played Al Pacino's locker room speech from "Any Given Sunday" in an attempt to instill the importance of 'inches' to the race team that has had flashes of brilliance over the last couple years but largely has fallen deep into the mid-pack after years of darkhorse title contention with Graham Rahal.
'The inches we need are everywhere around us," the speech goes. "They're in every break of the game, every minute, every second. On this team, we fight for that inch. On this team, we tear ourselves and everyone else around us to pieces for that inch. We claw with our fingernails for that inch, because we know that when we add up all those inches, that's going to make the (expletive) difference between winning and losing.'
With all three cars in the Fast Six at the IMS road course and a challenge for the win by Rahal, the team found some inches. They found a few more in leading the most laps in the 500, qualifying a car on the front row and landing a pair of top-12 finishes for the team's two youngest drivers.
But in the two weeks since — races that have included four crashed cars, three did-not-finishes and no finishes better than 20th across all three of the team's full-time cars — RLL has left yards' worth of inches strewn across the track. Road America, Frye told IndyStar, marks an opportunity to spool back up some momentum.
'We've shot ourselves in the foot a lot and lost a lot of points, and we can't do that. There's things we have to do to adjust and make sure that type of stuff doesn't happen,' Frye told IndyStar, hours ahead of what proved to be a dismal night at World Wide Technology Raceway for RLL, with Rahal 22nd eight laps down on pace, Devlin DeFrancesco 43 laps down in 23rd after a Lap 4 crash the team managed to repair and rookie Louis Foster in 26th by virtue of a crash caused by drifting too high into the marbles and ending up in the wall before he'd be T-boned by Josef Newgarden.
'We had a team meeting (a couple weeks ago), and I showed the team that clip … and that's what this is," he continued. "There's little things all around you, and if you don't take advantage of them or capitalize on them, and you mess that inch up, you end up 20th, and we should've finished 12th. When our cars have been fast, we've finished 20th, and when our cars are not as fast, we've been finishing 20th. You've got to find a way to build that momentum and get it going.'
'You have to reprogram your whole mind': Fired by IndyCar, Jay Frye talks new role with RLL
Entering this weekend, both Foster and DeFranesco, 24th and 25th in points respectively, sit outside the all-important Leaders Circle spots that pay the top 22 charter-holding IndyCar entrants more than $1.1 million the following year. At the moment, the Nos. 45 and 30 cars sit 23rd and 24th — with Rahal's No. 15 plummeting down to 18th after sitting 13th following his season-best sixth-place finish on the IMS road course.
Over the last four years at Road America, RLL has taken a liking to the National Park of Speed, with eight finishes of 11th or better out of 11 starts. In 10 career starts at the track, Rahal has only finished outside the top 11 once and has a pair of podiums in 2007 and 2016. With its billiard table-smooth surface, Road America offers some similarities to the IMS road course, a track RLL has shined at across the board in recent years, giving Frye hope Saturday's qualifying and Sunday's race can act as a spring board for the team ahead of a jam-packed July without an off weekend.
'There's so much good here. There's a lot of really good things, but again, it's just about piecing it all together and getting some momentum on our side,' Frye said. 'We really need to finish where we're running. You've got to maximize what we've got, and we need to build momentum and finish the year strong and build into 2026. That's the key.
'Momentum is a funny thing.'
Insider: Jay Frye was once IndyCar's change agent, until he no longer fit the Penske mold
Reflecting back on his previous life as a NASCAR team executive, Frye pointed to his days atop MB2 Motorsports in 2007, where driver Mark Martin finished 0.02 seconds from a Daytona 500 win, and then went on a tear for the otherwise mid-pack team and led the points for several weeks at the start of that year.
'And then there's other times where you've having trouble, and you can work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and you can't get out of (a rut),' he said. 'We're not struggling. There's good things that have been happening, except it's been inconsistent. Momentum is real, and I felt like we were building some coming out of May and had three or four things happen, and we don't get a good result, and there went that momentum.
'We've got to stop that.'
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