'I could finally drive the way I wanted to': Inside Conor Daly's last-minute ride with MSR
LEXINGTON, Ohio – Beth Boles was two hours behind schedule, but by 10 a.m. Saturday morning, she was on the road, navigating towards I-70 to watch her son race.
On Michigan Road, 10 minutes from her Zionsville home, her phone rang. Her other son was on the line.
“You’ve got to go to my condo and get all my stuff,” Conor Daly told his mother, frantically.
“I was like, ‘What? I’m going to New Castle,’” she replied as he headed towards New Castle Motorsports Park to kickoff a weekend of watching her younger son, Carter Boles, rip around the go-kart track with husband (and IMS president) Doug Boles.
Expecting a rainy, wacky weather day, her car was packed with a handful of odds and ends Carter and Doug had left behind that morning. When Daly explained the situation, Beth’s destination immediately changed.
She turned around and roared back up the road to get the emergency key to Daly’s Indianapolis condo. Then, the 30-minute drive downtown for Conor's helmet, shoes and other knick-knacks needed to put him in position to fill in for Simon Pagenaud, who had just walked away from a violent crash when the brakes of his No. 60 Honda failed at 180 mph barreling toward Turn 4 at Mid-Ohio.
Pagenaud told reporters he “felt fine,” but he’d have to wait 24 hours for a re-evaluation to see if IndyCar medical director Dr. Julia Vaizer would clear him to return to the cockpit. Knowing the severity of his impact and the series’ heightened awareness of lingering concussion-like symptoms, MSR leadership began scrambling to find a potential stand-in – a driver ready, willing and capable of hopping into the No. 60 Honda with nothing more than a 30-minute warmup session.
For Mike Shank, Daly was the obvious choice.
“He was here. We know he’s capable, and he knows the repetition of how to get around here, from how we leave the pitlane to how we do warmup,” said Shank, who quietly tested Daly eight years ago in his IMSA team’s LMP2 car. “We just didn’t need any drama here (Sunday). We already had enough of that Saturday.”
Less than four weeks earlier, Daly, the 31-year-old Noblesville-native, had been abruptly cut from his No. 20 Chevy ride at Ed Carpenter Racing days after the Detroit Grand Prix. Team owner Ed Carpenter later told IndyStar it was the hardest thing he’d done in racing, but necessary to begin to answer the questions of his teams near-constant struggles in recent months.
Friday marked Daly’s return to the paddock. He roamed Mid-Ohio’s transporters, garage stalls and RVs as an IndyCar spectator for the first time in four years. Friday night, he slept at the home of the parents of his girlfriend, Amymarie Gaertner, an hour or so north of the track. As he drove back through Mid-Ohio’s gates Saturday morning, he’d planned to watch Practice No. 2 and qualifying before heading home to watch Sunday’s race from his couch.
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Now, his mom was leaving his condo and driving back up to the northside of Indy and waiting outside ECR’s shop for her son’s custom-fitted IndyCar seat and then heading east.
“She calls and says, ‘Hey, I’m not stopping by the go-kart track,’ and I said, ‘Why, what happened?’” Doug Boles recalled for IndyStar on Sunday. “We’d seen (Simon’s) crash, but we didn’t know the full scale of everything. We were on the grid, getting ready to run, and she says, ‘I’m just coming up to New Castle,’ and we watched her drive by with all our stuff and she just kept on going.”
Said Beth: “I told them, ‘I don’t think I have time to stop and chat.’”
As she sped by on I70, Beth said she could see and hear the go-karts whirring around the track. She rolled down the window, honked and waved.
“And she realized she forgot her hard card,” Doug continued, “so I had to call (the Mid-Ohio ticket office) and say, ‘Hey, could you get (Beth) a single-event credential and a parking pass?'”
When Beth rolled up at 3:30pm – “A new track record” for the drive, she laughed – the passes were waiting for her. She’d soon find out her younger son and husband weren't far behind.
“He decided not to race (Sunday),” Doug said, pointing to Carter. “You just don’t know how many opportunities you get.”
A 'spirited' last-minute performance
By 7 a.m. Sunday morning, Daly was told the ride was his for the day. He’d done this before – running the Long Beach Grand Prix in 2015 for Dale Coyne Racing after fellow fill-in Rocky Moran Jr. broke his thumb during that Friday’s second practice. But even then, Daly, who at the time had made a single IndyCar start – the 2013 Indy 500 nearly two years prior – got a full practice, as well as a qualifying session, to get his bearings inside the car, build up some level of rapport with his strategist and debrief with the team’s engineers.
Then, he could sleep on it all, prepare mentally and wake up refreshed and get whatever final questions he still had answered.
Sunday, Daly got a chance to run 14 laps in the No. 60. Two hours after that session, he was back out near pitlane for driver introductions. And yet, in those scant moments Beth Boles got to watch her son during the morning's 30-minute session – where Daly finished an impressive 12th-fastest on the 27-car grid – she couldn’t help but detect a different air about her son.
She, too, roamed the grounds Sunday morning beaming, sporting a pink shirt she’d quickly grabbed Saturday morning before she left the house. She sported a black cap with “CD” on the front in big, bold letters – her second one of the day after being reminded the first featured ECR’s logo on the back. “They all kept giving me a hard time,” Beth chuckled.
“I just saw this new spirit (in Conor on Sunday morning). These people (at MSR) were so welcoming, friendly. It’s a good group there and a different atmosphere, and it was neat to be able to have him drive with them,” she said moments after Sunday’s race. “I was like, 12th? After 14 laps in a brand-new car?”’
That speed continued for Daly on Sunday afternoon, even if the end result wasn’t as good. After starting last because the No. 60 had been unable to attempt qualifying Saturday, Daly made up seven spots to land 20th.
“I’ve never fought so hard for 20th in my (expletive) life,” Daly’s team owner for the day told IndyStar. “But I was really happy with what Conor did, considering we’d just thrown him into the fire. I think he liked the car for the most part. I know balance-wise, it’s very different from what he’d been driving, and it took him a little while – and we got held up by (Benjamin Pedersen) for way too long. Results-wise, that was ultimately our big demise.
“(Daly’s) pace was more like 12th-14th, which is great, but when you get held up in a train, you just can’t do anything. We just laid the race plan down for him, and it worked.”
Having not driven a Honda Indy car since 2019, Daly said picking up the manufacturer’s own intricacies on the fly was where he struggled most – particularly during the first stint in a bunch of dirty air while fighting from the very back.
“I just couldn’t get by, and that’s just my fault for not understanding this car’s strengths,” he said. “The second half of the race, I found it, and I started passing people and was like, ‘Alright, here we go.’"
With 14 laps to go, Daly found himself in 21st and right on the rear wing of teammate Helio Castroneves. Six seconds up the road? Ryan Hunter-Reay, Daly’s replacement at ECR. Across the next seven laps, Daly would make quick work of Castroneves and get within just a half-second of the No. 20 Chevy.
But the opportunity for a lunging pass never quite came.
“I wanted to beat them really badly, but I also knew it’s better to be smart than stupid,” Daly said.
Daly: 'I could finally drive the way I wanted to drive'
Still gasping for air minutes after stepping out of the cockpit and searching for a bottle of water while wearing a fire suit meant for crew members that was unzipped and dragging on the pavement, Daly was greeted by the smiling face of MSR co-owner Jim Meyer.
“Really good job today, man. Helluva job,” Meyer told Daly. “I’m proud of you.”
“Thank you for the opportunity,” Daly replied.
Next weekend, Daly will return to Mid-Ohio for a one-off NASCAR Trucks race with Niece Motorsport, the last announced race on his calendar. He’ll likely be a constant in the IndyCar paddock, as he keeps working to find a sponsor and a team willing to help him return to the grid for the 2024 500 at the very least.
“This was all just really reassuring, honestly,” Daly said of the race and the weekend at-large. “I felt like I could finally drive the way I wanted to drive, and when you look at the potential, man, the potential is so high. When you get in, and it feels good, you get really excited to drive again.”
For MSR, Shank said the team expects to learn of Pagenaud’s status for the Honda Indy Toronto (July 16) next Monday, and the driver told IndyStar on Sunday morning that IndyCar’s medical team told him they didn’t see any reason why he wouldn’t be cleared to return to the cockpit. From there, Pagenaud will continue his quest to, at bare minimum, get the No. 60 firmly into the top-22 in points – it sits 23rd at the moment – to secure the roughly $1 million in Leaders Circle funding for 2024. Whether Pagenaud will be the one manning it past September, Shank said, is still to be determined.
“We have (one IndyCar ride for 2024) done already that we’ll announce in August, and we’re working on the other one,” Shank said Sunday post-race. “We’re going to do some things next year, I promise.
“I’m just glad Simon’s okay. Honestly, that actually shook me a little bit. It’s just terrifying, you know? It’s the feeling you get when your heart just drops. But everyone reacted so quickly, and the boys were out of the track by 8 p.m. (Saturday). And that’s a testament to the crew. Conor, he took the time and spent four or five hours with the engineers (Saturday) when we were debating what to do. He just did the work. No matter if he raced or not, he just did the work, and then he got to see what we had.”
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: IndyCar: Inside Conor Daly's last-minute ride with Meyer Shank Racing
