Obviously, you know, what he's referring to in the race is when Will Power hit me and spun me out and we came back to win. There's so many guys that wouldn't be able to deal with that kind of adversity, and I think something that he always told me as a kid was, you know, the most important thing is to stay calm and keep a level head. Because no matter what, no matter what position you're in in the race we fell back to 22 and got stuck with Oriol in traffic even though we had a quicker car, there's always a chance to win.
I just kept telling myself, saying, look, we are a long way when Will hit me, we were only like a third or maybe not quite a half of the way through the race and there was still an opportunity for us to go and win and that's exactly what we did.
The biggest thing is just to stay calm and it all I don't know why he said I'm from a different planet, but I can tell you, it comes directly from him, because he was always that way.
Q:
What were your thoughts crossing the finish line?
GR:
Well, first off, I must admit that everybody had been talking about the history. But I've got to tell you that I didn't even remember the history part of it until Kathi [Lauterbach] said something to me, just as I had stopped the car and was getting ready to get out it. Didn't even cross my mind whatsoever.
I also should probably say that I really don't think it's even hit me yet that I've won, because you know, being as busy as I've been, it takes a long time to hit you and doesn't seem to have taken the effect of course when you win, it feels so good to win and to win in the fashion that we did, and everybody might say that we lucked into it because of strategy
![Graham Rahal - Newman/Haas/Lanigan Racing [pic credit: IRL/McQueeney]](http://pix.crash.net/thumbs/426257.jpg)
