FBI Raids Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing Headquarters in Zionsville
Federal agents raid Rahal Letterman Lanigan headquarters in Zionsville. I’m here to tell you that is not the headline that you expected. But it is the headline that you got.
Kurt Darling is our racing guy for WIBC. All right, on a scale of one to strange, how strange is this?
It’s, it’s very strange, Tony. You were certainly right about the shock factor. I actually was informed about this last night… Our news director, John Herrick actually brought this to my attention that this had happened. And so, then I was able to kind of do a little bit of digging myself. And yeah, it was, it was certainly something you never expect. For something like this to happen, especially when it comes to a racing team such as Rahal, Letterman, Lanigan. But yes, the federal agents raided the RLL facility in Zionsville about 8:30 yesterday morning. And yeah, it was basically a show up. They told the employees, hey, stop what you’re doing on your electronic devices. Leave them as is, gather your belongings and get out. So, that’s basically the gist of what happened. No word on exactly what this investigation from the FBI is in any way pertaining to… but there’s some rumors of some possible intellectual property having changed hands an Andretti employee, former Andretti employee who now works. RLL, there’s a lot of speculation about that right now, but yes, Tony, it’s very strange.
Let’s take a moment because I don’t want to brush over that. It’s believed and you’ve got the reporting at WIBC.com. It’s a must read that the FBI visited Andretti Global last month. They were looking for information and it’s. It may, it may have to do with this employee who worked at one and now worked at the other. I would make the assumption that people within the world of racing, within the world of IndyCar, they move teams very, very often. It’s a, I mean it’s a closed sandbox. If you want to work on IndyCar, there are only so many people you can work with. The idea of someone going from one team to another, that isn’t necessarily new, is it?
No, not at all, in fact. And it it’s the same thing. It just like here you hear drivers moving from team to team. It’s called IndyCar silly season. That’s the colloquial term that we have in the IndyCar community basically. Well, it’s the same thing for race engineers. It’s the same thing for workers, aero-designers, you name it, any kind of employee that works within the racing community is moving from one team to another based on availability, money, what have you and so yeah it’s not uncommon to see one an engineer or any kind of worker from one team go to the other but there is a careful process and how that takes place and clearly based on some sources as well. And of course, Racer Magazine was the first to report about the possible intellectual property stuff that was going on. But there was clearly something that happened in this transition that said that caught the Fed’s attention saying, hey. Something’s not right here. We need to step in. And yeah, it led to the raid, basically.
In this raid, talking to Kurt Darling from the WBC newsroom, our man who covers all in the car and all racing. No, no arrests or anything like that?
No, no, no. No arrests. And no threat to the public either, just to be clear about that as well. So yeah. It was basically, it seems like it was most likely a fact-finding type of thing from the feds. But like I said, the FBI, there’s not a whole lot to know officially about this yet. The federal, the FBI hasn’t said anything about this. They did go to a Mayor John Stehr of Zionsville to ask for some backup from Zionsville PD and executing this raid that was reported by the IBJ. And so, yeah, you have a whole lot of pieces to this, but it all comes back to the fact that yeah, Tony, you, you, you hit the nail on the head. It’s very strange to see something like this. And the one thing that I’m a little curious about is that this happened a week after the end of the end of the NTT IndyCar season. So, I’m kind of wondering, OK. If there was something afoul, why wasn’t this executed ahead of time? Or was it just a coincidence that had happened immediately after the end of the season? There’s a whole lot of questions still to be asked
Talking to Kurt Darling from the WIBC newsroom. How does IndyCar respond to this? Does Rahal Letterman get a phone call from the captain, “So. Got anything you want to tell me?” I mean, is this the kind of thing where Mark Miles who heads up IndyCar and Penske Entertainment makes comments or is asking questions? How has IndyCar responded?
Well, there has been no response yet from IndyCar, Penske Entertainment, Indianapolis Motor Speedway, anybody as we’re in regard to this. In fact, the only statement that’s been released from anybody right now has actually been from Ray Hall where they said we’re cooperating fully with investigators. Given that this is an ongoing investigation, we’re limited in what information that we can share right now, but we intend to provide additional information as soon as we can. So that’s the only statement that’s really been made in response to this, but. I would imagine if you’re anybody in leadership of the NTT IndyCar Series, you’re getting on the phone with either Bobby Rahal or even David Letterman for that matter, and asking, hey, what gives? You know, because clearly something’s run afoul here and now the now the feds are involved. So, I would imagine that there will be some sort of response coming very, very soon. But yeah, there’s been no response yet from IndyCar, Penske Entertainment
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