Busy Week for Bobby Rahal

The 38th Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach week is busy for Bobby Rahal. As president of the Road Racing Drivers Club, he'll preside over the fourth annual West Coast banquet honoring race car driver and Indy car innovator Jim Hall on April 12.

He'll also spend much of the weekend on pit lane, overseeing the efforts of Takuma Sato in the No. 15 Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing car and the BMW Team RLL in the American Le Mans Series race on the 1.968-mile, 11-turn temporary street course.

Of course, he'd like to close the weekend with his first Indy car victory at Long Beach.

Rahal competed in Long Beach as a driver eight times (1984-1991) and as a driver/owner seven times (1992-1998). He started from the front row twice and finished second four times (1988, 1991, 1992, 1993), and Jimmy Vasser brought the team another runner-up finish in 2002.

The next year – the team's last time to compete in the Indy car race — Michel Jourdain Jr. won pole, led a field-high 48 laps and was in the lead when his car stuck in gear on his final stop with seven laps to go and retired in 15th place. Last year, the BMW team of Joey Hand and Dirk Müller gave Rahal his first victory at Long Beach.

Drink up in Milwaukee: Milwaukee IndyFest announced RC Cola, a soft-drink brand of Dr Pepper Snapple Group, as the Official Soft Drink of IndyFest, and have placed a limited number of VIP pit passes on sale at http://www.MilwaukeeIndyFest.com and at the Wisconsin State Fair Park box office (414-266-7100).