Ride Onboard Graham Rahal’s Honda-Powered IndyCar For A Bumpy Lap Of Sebring

He’s experiencing some serious forces with peaks around 2.7 G under braking and 3.5 G through some corners

If there were ever a track to put a car through its paces and see if anything breaks, it’s going to be Sebring International. An old World War II airfield, the concrete is some seventy-odd years old, and has never been repaved. Aside from that, Sebring is practically on the beach in Florida and the ground is regularly wet enough that some of these concrete blocks have shifted and sunk over the years. They’re cracked and upheaved worse than the old parking lot of the closed-down KMart back in your home town. It’s rough going taking a lap of the place in a street car with properly sprung suspension, let alone trying to navigate it in a stiffly sprung, high downforce, 600-ish horsepower open wheel IndyCar racer.

Graham Rahal, then, must be a champ for agreeing to take his Honda out for a few laps during the test earlier this week. Not only just taking the car out for a few laps, he found some pace and laid down some pretty impressive laps. You can see his helmet-mounted camera bouncing around quite a bit under braking, so we can only imagine what it must have felt like inside the cockpit.

IndyCar of late has been practically dominated by Chevrolet-engined cars, particularly those of the Penske team, and Honda has been on the back foot. Graham Rahal, running for his father Bobby’s Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing team, was Honda’s best-placed driver of the 2016 season (fifth in points behind Pagenaud, Power, Castroneves, and Newgarden, all Chevrolet drivers), and he’s hoping to continue that forward momentum to more victories this season. If he keeps pushing this hard in testing and can capitalize on testing miles with setup improvements, then he’s sure to have another great season. We’re standing behind Graham, cheering the whole season.

[Source: IndyCar on YouTube]