Conor Daly exclusive: Staying driven, “false promises” & the future
- Archie O’Reilly
- 5 days ago
- 11 min read
It is all so familiar for Conor Daly. So much so, he has become almost a reluctant master of managing the anguish of its cruelty. Over the years, there has become no other option.
“You don’t get anything by just sitting and moping,” he insists. “You’ve got to be there, got to be ready, got to be walking around, having the exact same conversation with 100 people the same time during the weekend. ‘When are you gonna be in the car again? What are you doing?’ It’s the worst conversation to have ever but you’ve got to have it all the time.”
Unprompted, he mentions Linus Lundqvist. Callum Ilott too.
Both seven years his junior, they are highly-touted talents not so well-versed in the bitter monotony of being left, in the eyes of many, unjustly sidelined. Maybe they will come to learn the ways. If in quite the same vein as Daly, their fate will have been particularly savage.
Because now 34 years old and a grizzled veteran - or journeyman, if you like - of 132 IndyCar starts across 11 different teams, Daly continues to feel the wrath of the oft-unwarranted brutality of motorsport, whether he has come to bear it or not. And on this latest occasion, there is a surefire argument his free-agency is the harshest yet.
Daly was pleased with the campaign he produced in a first complete season with Juncos Hollinger Racing (JHR) in 2025 - an opportunity earned by a late-season stint in 2024, which brought the team their first-ever podium at the Milwaukee Mile.
A point Daly himself is keen to emphasise, statistically speaking, with his 268 points in 2025 - compared to Ilott’s 266 in 2023 and Romain Grosjean’s 260 in 2024 - he delivered better for one of IndyCar’s smallest teams than any driver has done in their brief IndyCar history. Not to mention that he was 87 points clear of teammate Sting Ray Robb in the standings.
And yet, as much as racing can be a ‘results business’, Daly knows all too well that much more factors into the industry. Still, feeling he has scarcely driven better, he entered the off-season with belief. But it transpired to be another elongated grind of false hope.
“It was one of my best seasons,” he assesses, speaking to DIVEBOMB from his home last week. “Replacing me is understandable; it’s obviously happened before. But we’re the smallest team, lost engineers over the off-season before I got there, a lot of young people at the team, who are very talented.
“My teammate obviously was much further behind me in the championship. We almost won the 500, should have won Gateway, should have probably won at least one of the Iowa races. But all the small things add up: small issues in the pits, small issues here and there.
“I feel like I did the best job that I could. I put together more points than any driver ever had for that team, the best finish for the team…”
A month-and-a-half after season’s end, Rinus VeeKay was announced to be joining JHR. But at least publicly, uncertainty loomed over the other half of that lineup. Hope for Daly? Not so. Another month-and-a-half passed before there was clarity, but as Robb insisted was never in doubt, the 24-year-old’s return was revealed in early December.
So Daly, having spearheaded the team in 2025, particularly with four top-10 results in the six oval races, was as good as axed. A picture of painful similarity to much of his volatile career - most recently after being cut by Ed Carpenter Racing in mid-2023 - ensued again.
“Every weekend, if you knew the conversations that were being had…” Daly pauses. “The hope is never dead but it’s hard to know what to believe.”
Daly was persistent. As late as the week before the season commenced, there was still another full-time opportunity on the table. But nothing panned out quite as he envisaged and his tireless efforts, both before and after the JHR option disappeared, proved fruitless.
“We had a great programme in place,” Daly acknowledges. “We raised a lot of money - honestly, more than I think I have in a really long time - and it just wasn’t enough. There’s a couple drivers that had a little bit more and we’re talking… it’s a big number.
“And I had a big number. I thought if I had the number I had when I was a rookie, I’d be driving for Ganassi or any one of the top teams. Easy. But times change. The rate the sport’s become a little bit more expensive has become a little bit more difficult to dive into.
“But it was just a lot of conversations that lasted a long time that just nothing really played out like we were told it was going to play out. So it then became a situation of: ‘How do we continue to have our partners in the series?’”
With that in mind, over the season-opening weekend of the IndyCar season in St. Petersburg, Daly was ‘unveiled’ as reserve driver for JHR. But there were no bells and certainly no whistles. The announcement was, instead, hidden within a press release confirming that ARCO, a sponsor of Daly’s, would remain onboard at JHR with VeeKay.
The concept of a ‘reserve driver’ - more synonymous with Formula One - has shown signs of pending proliferation in IndyCar, though despite technically being one, Daly is not such a believer. In his case, JHR carries his seat and helmet to races but he seldom serves any performance-based purpose.
“There’s really no use for reserve drivers in IndyCar,” he says. “But we have a sponsor and we have to put it somewhere. Me being a reserve driver for them doesn’t mean that I can’t get in any other car in the series. And the funny thing is even if I am reserve driver, I would like to think that you’re still the first choice but who knows? I’ve seen crazier things happen.”
Above all, the ‘reserve’ relationship with JHR is entirely commercial, with the primary focus of Daly keeping a trusted new partner involved in the sport. Naturally, this is considerably irksome for Daly, seeing a competitor-if-friend bearing the fruits of his own labour.
“That’s a thing I’ve had to really accept because it sucks to see someone else drive with your sponsor on the car. That’s like the worst thing ever,” he asserts. “But ARCO has been really loyal to me and they’ve been very, very supportive of what we’re trying to do, which is be full-time. They want me to be full-time, hopefully in ’27.
“So it is a good affiliation for us to continue our business partnership with ARCO and the JHR folks have been helpful. But essentially, we’re bringing them a good chunk of cash to keep our partner in the sport and to keep that relationship as strong as we can keep it.”
So far in 2026, Daly has still attended most races, including creating content for IndyCar’s social channels. It is never easy watching his peers from the sidelines, though having much of the IndyCar world rallying around him has provided some solace.
“It’s the people that really know what goes on… a lot of the people in the paddock and people that I’ve worked with and some of the messages and interactions that you have in the paddock, I think a lot of that,” he admits. “And the respect that some of the other drivers have, as we have for each other, that’s what keeps me motivated and keeps me around.
“It [also] means a lot when a tonne of fans per weekend say: ‘Hey, we can’t wait till you’re back in the car.’ That type of stuff keeps you going.”
The off-season did conclude with Daly landing an Indianapolis 500 drive with Dreyer & Reinbold Racing (DRR). A return to the Speedway was an inevitability for a hometown driver who has led laps in four of the last five 500s and has four successive top-10 finishes at the Speedway, but it at least offers a racing focus and something tangible to work towards.
Such is the faith DRR were willing to place in Daly, who returns to the team for the second time in three seasons, they were willing to wait in case he secured a full-time deal elsewhere. This patience was welcome in fraught times for Daly.
“This deal was in front of me in October of last year,” he details. “It was very, very early on they wanted me back - and that was awesome. But they were kind enough to hold off for a long time because we had countless false promises handed out to us.
“We have to believe those until they truly aren’t real. Even my last potential full-time opportunity didn’t really get taken away from me until the week before St. Pete. I was signed [with DRR] but if there was something that was going to happen, they were prepared.
“No matter what, they stayed supportive. They also realised I’m in a good spot driving wise. I feel really competitive currently. I feel better than I ever have so they understood: ‘Of course, you’re not just in that Month-of-May-only mindset.’ I want to be competing every weekend.”
The DRR deal was finally announced in March, alongside confirmation that the team itself had attracted Kingspan as a primary partner, which was much to Daly’s amazement.
“I don’t remember the last time a team had a partner brought to my car,” Daly suggests, with later announcements also confirming some sharing of partners between DRR and JHR, including making VeeKay’s No.76 car a co-entry. “I’ve been the only one who’s been finding sponsors for my car over the last few years so that was cool.”
Daly recovered from 29th to finish 10th with DRR in 2024, leading 22 laps in the process. The team’s competitiveness was further reinforced last year, when Ryan Hunter-Reay was set to lead the race in a back-up car after his final pit stop, before running out of fuel.
At the same time, there are naturally some drawbacks for Indy-only teams - as minute as being unable to justify the purchase of the newer Cosworth steering wheel, which Daly theories would cost in excess of $100,000 for four items across the team’s two cars.
“That shouldn’t affect anything. It’s just the small things. But we should have what we need to compete. We show up with the same attitude and that’s ‘win or nothing’. That’s the only way to go about doing it. They build the cars to try to win. They have done the development and spent the money to try to win. We have the partners that are supporting us to win.
“We have a great package, have a great group of people. They’ve made some important hires over the off-season. When I look at what they’ve done, it’s the stuff that you need to do to win the race. It’s areas of development that you need to focus on to win the race.”
Chief among the new hires is Eric Leichtle, who engineered Robert Shwartzman to his shock Indy 500 pole position as a rookie for the debuting PREMA Racing team last year. The ability to compare his information with that of DRR from last year, plus factoring in Daly’s experience with a seventh different team at the Speedway, should be a handy bonus.
There is hope that Daly’s run with DRR only two years ago should allow a seamless reintegration. But even in the interim period, the team has made a number of marked changes as they place constant emphasis on development for their sole race every season.
“The team spends time in the [wind] tunnel,” Daly explains. “We focus on some of the things that you can focus on to get raw speed out of the car. The gearboxes are super important when it comes to just pure speed.
“They have an entirely different damper programme to when I was there two years ago - a very fresh programme there, which they say is much better, which is exciting for me because we were already in a very good position in ’24 with these guys.
“There really is a never-ending amount that you can do to these cars and the internals. Structurally, you’re not going to see a different front wing on anyone’s car. But there is still so much to do within the realm of what you are allowed to do.
“No one really knows what we’re doing. More information is found all the time [and] we are still going to be begging for every minute of track time possible [at Indianapolis].”
Once the Indy 500 and the much-appreciated relief it provides concludes, Daly’s focus will revert back again to the future. Groundhog Day once more.
The absence of PREMA Racing from the field has led to suggestions that there may be scope for additional entries to lift the 25-car grid to the 27-driver cap, which would provide additional opportunities for drivers such as Daly.
With that, there has been speculation as to whether DRR could possibly fill the field with cars outside of the Indy 500. There would be an appetite internally, though such a move could be tough to justify. Longer term, though, there remains no ruling out possible attempts from DRR to obtain a charter to return to the full-time field for the first time since 2012.
“I think the chance of Dreyer & Reinbold doing anything outside of Indy is very low,” Daly concedes. “I just don’t think it’s reasonable when it comes to the expenses and the equipment. It’s hard to be full-time. We saw PREMA try to do it… did not last long. It takes a tonne of money - more than people even think.
“Right now, people are like: ‘Oh, we hope Dreyer buys PREMA.’ Well, why would they do that? They have all the stuff that PREMA has. The only thing that Dreyer would be interested in is charters, if they can get ahold of those, because we have cars and trucks. If you buy PREMA, all you buy is cars and trucks so it’s not really like it helps them out at all.
“They would be prepared to do stuff and I think a lot of the guys want to do more stuff. But you have to have the finances and the ability to do that structurally to do it correctly.”
Daly does have races planned for later in the season outside of IndyCar, which will likely be announced after the Indy 500. But he also remains confident that opportunities could still emerge in IndyCar later in the year.
“I don’t think the 500 will be my only IndyCar race. I definitely don’t think that,” he reveals. “Can I expand on that? No. But I just don’t think that that’s going to be the only one. The 500 itself has a way of separating the year. After Indy, people start to think about other things.
“You’ve got to get through Indy, because even anyone who brought money to the table, all that money is going towards the 500. That’s the most sellable race. You’re not going to see anyone replaced before Indy. That’s never going to happen. And you might not see anyone replaced at all. But we’ve seen it way more often than ever in IndyCar lately.
“So I feel confident that I’ll end up doing more races. Where? I have no idea. But I’m trying to create some for myself somehow. And all we can do is go from Indy. And if I win the 500, maybe there’ll be more opportunities. Who knows?”
Certainly, Daly will not entertain the idea of giving up hope. As much as uncertainty has defined the first decade-plus of his career, he continues to strive for some thus-far-elusive stability - now as one of the series’ more seasoned heads.
After all, he is still pursuing a maiden win and remains desperate to prove wrong those who use that fact as a stick with which to beat him.
“People like to quote stats on me: ‘Oh, he’s never won a race.’ Okay, cool. I’ve had one teammate in my life ever win a race - one out of [132 races]. So I’ve not been in winning positions. I’m proud of what I’ve been able to do with the resources that we’ve had.
“It’s just a shame we didn’t get to continue them [with JHR]. Because still, in my entire life, I’ve never had two full seasons in the same car with the same team. So it’s hard to do better when you just get shuffled out in no time.”
It has not been an easy ride for Daly. And it still remains as such. But when any successes come - as he holds firm belief remains possible - they will be all the sweeter for the grind.
