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The FBI on Wednesday was on site at the headquarters of Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing in Zionsville as part of an undisclosed investigation.
The race team—which fields cars in the IndyCar and IMSA racing leagues—issued a statement Wednesday saying it is “cooperating fully with investigators” but did not elaborate on the type of inquiry underway.
“Given that this is an ongoing investigation, we are limited in what information we can share right now, but we intend to provide additional information as soon as we can,” the RLL statement said.
Zionsville Mayor John Stehr initially confirmed to IBJ that the FBI requested assistance from Zionsville police for investigative activity, with authorities arriving at the Rahal Letterman Lanigan facility at 10771 Creek Way at about 8:30 a.m.
Stehr said the FBI “was serving a warrant as part of a larger investigation.” The FBI asked the Zionsville Police Department to “send some cars, which we did,” Stehr said. “But they did not give us any information” on the nature of the investigation.
He deferred additional questions to the FBI. Chris Bavender, a spokeswoman for the agency’s Indianapolis office, declined to comment.
Rahal Letterman Lanigan is owned by former IndyCar champion and Indianapolis 500 winner Bobby Rahal, longtime television host David Letterman and Mi-Jack co-owner Mike Lanigan.
It fields three cars in IndyCar, featuring drivers Pietro Fittipaldi, Christian Lundgaard and Rahal’s son, Graham Rahal.
Rahal Letterman Lanigan also fields two cars in the International Motor Sports Association. The team opened its 100,000-square-foot headquarters in 2022 in Zionsville.
Alex Damron, a spokesman for IndyCar, told IBJ, “We’re aware and monitoring the situation.”
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So no news, just noise
Somebody was probably a Trump supporter.
Wasn’t Letterman.
PlanetF1.com is reporting that the investigation is related to a former Andretti Green engineer that may have taken intellectual property to RLL.
Andretti GREEEN ended at least 10 and I think more like 15 yrs ago. So the intellectual prop is prob pretty stale.
Ha, yeah, that’s what a long day will do to you. Meant Andretti Global. Good catch.
Racer.com has a story confirming what David B says. It’s completely irresponsible of the IBJ not to have updated this story by now!
FBI won’t say, because they so incompetent.
It’s also irresponsible to write a “story” with three uses of the word “alleged”. Either you know the facts and you report on them or you don’t.
The only fact in that story is a No Comment from the Andretti team COO.
I was wrong. Alledged was used five times.
We can see that the potential intellectual property transfer has really helped RLL this past season. Ugh!
Is this a Babylon Bee article? In a City with daily school beatings and criminals setting streets on fire to draw in cops to be ambushed (I notice the IBJ “journalists” buried that story) the FBI is “raiding” a race team because they may have stolen “intellectual property” from another race team? Unreal
Fortunately Joe B will be along shortly to share his vast knowledge of civil tort law as it applies to racing teams, with us backwards Hoosiers living in the past
If it is regarding an intellectual property “crime”, it would seem like the FBI should have better things to be doing. Litigate all you want, but this doesn’t seem worthy of what is being portrayed in multiple media outlets.
Since this is Indpls BIZ Journal, makes sense they would report on this. It’s too bad we don’t have a decent local newspaper to report objectively on other important city news, such as street takeovers. Too much clickbait, too little substance, leaves readers looking to IBJ for wider coverage.
Correct!!!!!