Strange Situation for Rahal : Indy 500: After failing to qualify, last year’s Indy car champion will watch Sunday’s race from a sponsor’s suite.

INDIANAPOLIS —  On Sunday, Bobby Rahal will make a brief appearance on ABC-TV’s Indianapolis 500 pre-race program.

Then the winner of the 1986 Indy 500, the man who won the Indy car national championship last season, will repair to his primary sponsor’s suite high above the main straightaway to watch his fellow drivers at play.

“I’ve never not qualified for a race, so it’s a very strange thing,” said Rahal, whose early qualifying speed in what was to have been the only American-built car in the race was too slow to withstand the assault of later qualifiers.

“It’s easy to explain away,” he said. “I could say, ‘Well, gee, the car wasn’t handling very well anyway, so I’m kind of glad I’m not in it, especially starting (toward the back).’ But it’s going to be a weird feeling on Sunday.

“But I’m pretty philosophical about it. I think in racing you have to be, and it’s no good us sitting here, bemoaning our fate.”

Uh-huh.

“He’s going to miss the hell out of it,” said A.J. Foyt, the recently retired four-time Indy 500 winner who will be dealing with similar emotions. “It’s going to kill him, just kill him. He might say it won’t, but let’s just don’t lie to each other.”

So, apparently, Rahal can expect to spend a melancholy Sunday.

And yet, he says, he doesn’t regret his noble experiment.

“I still don’t disbelieve in the concept,” he said. “The concept is still valid. . . . What (the failure) shows is that you’d better have a backup (plan). If there’s a lesson for us in this, it’s that. But you still have to take the chances.”

Rahal has his backup now. He and Carl Hogan, his partner in the business, have one of the dominant British Lola chassis on order for the rest of the Indy car season. But for him, the 500 is history before it is run. And that most assuredly was not part of anyone’s plan. The Rahal-Hogan chassis was going to be Rahal’s unfair advantage--if not this season, then certainly next.

He drove it to second place last month in the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach and appeared to have worked out some of the earlier bugs.

But in Indianapolis, nothing went very well, except in practice, which only masked the problem.

“When Mike (Groff, the team’s second driver, from Studio City) tested here, we went 219 (m.p.h.) in some difficult conditions. So you say, ‘Gee, that’s a pretty good place to start,’ ” Rahal said. “So you put that setup on it and come back and go from there. I was sick the first few days (of practice), but Mike still did a good job for us and we got up to 220, 220 1/2, so we didn’t have much of an indication that we had that serious a problem.”

But then, shortly before the first weekend of qualifying, the car began mishandling seriously, and nothing the team did corrected it.

“That first weekend, we knew we had a problem, all of a sudden, and we reacted as quickly as we could, which was to order a Lola,” Rahal said. “Unfortunately, we couldn’t get it in time for here. And, of course, we’d already qualified by then anyway.”

But not for long. Rahal’s first qualifying lap, 218.140 m.p.h, would have put him solidly in the field, had he been able to match it with three more. Instead, with the car fighting him, he settled for an average of 217.140.

That car was bumped out of the lineup last Sunday, and when Rahal tried to qualify the team’s similar backup car, he couldn’t get it much over 217 and that on only one of the four qualifying laps. And he almost hit the wall.

“I don’t think this is something that we could have anticipated any earlier,” Rahal said. “Only by running here were we really able to tell we had a problem.”

Rahal could have left his team for the race, but as co-owner and a man with team and sponsorship obligations, he didn’t feel right about that. John Menard offered him a ride in one of his Lola-Menard Buicks, and driver Dominic Dobson offered to give up his seat to Rahal in a ’92 Galmer-Chevy. Rahal declined with thanks.

“Our bed was made,” he said.

So Rahal will be one of the millions of spectators Sunday, probably one wrestling with his emotions, and will drive a Lola the rest of the year.

He isn’t sure how the American-built experiment will develop.

“What’s been disappointing for me is that we put a lot of faith in this project, and we saw flashes of competitiveness--Long Beach--and we thought we’d made a lot of progress when the car ran 219 in testing. We took a risk, and we lost.

“But I think there’s going to be an Indy 500 next year, and I plan on being here. And I can tell you one thing: We’re going to come in a competitive car. It’s that simple.”