By alley - Jun 4, 2017, 7:43 PM ET

'We earned it today' - Rahal

It's said that winning can be infectious, and so it proved for Graham Rahal in Detroit, as the second generation racer claimed his first win of the year and followed it up with his second 24 hours later. As cathartic as the doubleheader sweep of the Detroit Duals was for Rahal personally, though, he emphasized at the post-race media conference how significant it was for his Rahal/Letterman/Lanigan Racing team.

"You know, first of all, got to tip the hat to them. The guys did a great job," he noted. "I can tell you within the organization it was just hard for our guys to bounce out of May, out of the [Indy] Grand Prix and everything else, and go right into this one, in a doubleheader to boot. To get a clean sweep this weekend – I think we got all but one point, which was pole for today. So, you know, just a great weekend."

"Well, obviously I wasn't super geeked about the red-flag scenario," he admitted. "I'm counting down laps. I'm looking at it on my dash. I know what my gap is to [Josef] Newgarden. I just cleared [Ryan] Hunter-Reay. Once I cleared Hunter-Reay, I knew I was good. I just wanted to finish the thing up.

"Then they say yellow. Oh, man, OK, now I've got to think about that and this, whatever. Then they go red. When they go red, you come in the pits. You sit. Your tires are cooling down. Your tires also have a ton of junk on them from everything that had kind of gone on. I could see all of that. Then they told me they're going to go green first time by.

"This sequence of events, it's hard. It's hard to get your tires clean. It's hard to get your brakes back warmed up. These things, they're a handful when that's the case.

"All my focus was is get through [Turns] 1 and 2 well. If I get through 1 and 2 well, I got this. You know, we got through one and two a lot better than they did. Went down into 3 without any pressure.

"And the other thing was that I knew, I had a ton of 'push to pass' left over, and he didn't have much. So I had double the amount of Newgarden. So I felt confident that I could get trigger-happy and keep pushing, pushing, pushing, and eventually he would be out and I wouldn't. I was fine."

Rahal noted that his quick start from his P3 starting spot played into his team's strategic plan on Sunday.

"I was just pleased with our performance to get by Hunter-Reay at the start to save a ton of fuel, to be able to go longer than [Takuma] Sato, to do those two phenomenal laps, and to come out of that pit sequence five seconds ahead is a huge accomplishment for me on a personal level. That was a good sequence there."

Rahal also felt the relatively trouble-free event also played to his strengths.

"It was perfect," he said of the long periods of green-flag running. "Number one, because guys are going to get tired. Just because of my size, you know, I don't get that tired. And I knew that. I felt physically better today than yesterday for whatever reason.

"I think what you're seeing here is the quality of drivers has increased – the level is so high in IndyCar racing, guys don't really make mistakes. Five, six years ago there's yellows because guys are making bonehead moves, making errors, spinning on their own, hitting the fence, locking up. It really just doesn't happen anymore because of the quality of the drivers has gone up so much. You've seen it here. You've seen it in a lot of other races. Alabama [Barber] there's never yellows. Long Beach there's rarely yellows. It's gotten pretty strong lately."

No one was strong enough for Rahal in Detroit though.

"It was fun. We earned it today," he added. "It wasn't that we started out and just crushed it. Lap 20, we were still running second. We passed Hunter-Reay. At the same time, because of yesterday's training, I was able to get the fuel number extremely easy today. So, again, I could run a really strong pace, better than most guys, while saving a ton of fuel. That's why I say, these weekends, they just don't happen that often.

"I could see right away Hunter-Reay was using his rear tires hard. I just kept pacing myself. I knew handful of laps in, he was not going to be looking pretty. Sure enough, you know, he fell off there.

"Then we caught Sato, and Taku was fast. He was using a lot of 'push to pass' for that early in the race. I just decided, OK, I'm going to start pressing it. I hit it twice behind him. Every straight, he was on it. I just decided, I can't burn it like this. Yet we were staying with him.

"When he pitted, we had a very strong in-and-out lap, and came out with a five-second lead. Just a really good turn of events there. Get clear, run hard, come out in front. From then, it was all in our hands."