Rising star on ride of his life in T.O.
Young American Conor Daly filling in for injured Hinchcliffe but doesn’t have anything yet lined up after Toronto
Seven years ago, retired F1 and IndyCar star Derek Daly — realizing he had a chip off the old block that needed some polishing — sent his son north from their home in Indiana to learn the nuances of race-driving. The kid learned well. This weekend that son, Conor Daly, is racing in the Honda Indy Toronto race at Exhibition Place, filling in for injured Canadian driver James Hinchcliffe, of Oakville.
On Friday, before the first of two scheduled practices in advance of qualifying trials Saturday and the race itself on Sunday, Conor enjoyed a reunion with his coach and mentor, Brian Graham of Innisfil, Ont., who took the-then 16-year- old under his wing when he was first dispatched to Canada by his dad.
“This is where it all started — Ontario,” laughed Daly, as Graham approached him to shake hands.
Shortly after, Daly and the rest of the 23 IndyCar drivers went out for shakedown laps and to begin the process of setting up their cars for qualifying. Surprisingly, some drivers got up to speed quite quickly and were setting competitive times.
Juan Pablo Montoya sat atop the speed charts at the end of that initial session with a time of one minute and .6343 seconds, which translates into a speed of 104.198 m.p.h. around the 1.755-mile circuit. Simon Pagenaud and Josef Newgarden were also turning laps in the one-minute range.
In comparison, Sebastien Bourdais won the pole for the first of two races a year ago with a time of 58.9479 seconds (107.179 m.p.h). If the weather is good Saturday — Friday was soggy, to be blunt — speeds are expected to be in the neighbourhood of Bourdais’s 2014 pole time.
Only one car ventured out for Friday afternoon’s scheduled 45-minute IndyCar practice, conducted during a downpour. Scott Dixon took his Jurassic World-sponsored Ganassi Racing car around or a reconnaissance lap after hitting the wall near the end of morning practice.
That fact the IndyCar contingent seems to be spooked by any amount of water on the track in Toronto caused some consternation.
A race was cancelled on the Saturday a year ago because of rain and although both races were held on the Sunday — the Honda Indy Toronto was a double-header last year — the distances were cut. And now this. But retired Canadian racing champion Paul Tracy, a two-time winner of this event who’s in Toronto to appear on the NBC Sports Network telecast, said because of poor drainage the track is “treacherous” when it gets wet.
“A lot of the teams don’t have spares,” Tracy said. “It can get to be a problem if cars are hitting walls and there’s damage and they don’t have replacements.”
Before the rains came, Daly was reminiscing about his time with Graham, whose Formula Ford (now Formula 1600) race team dominated Ontario racing when the youngster was up here for two races in 2007 and a full-season in 2008. At the same time, Daly raced a season in an American series.
“That was a huge year in my career,” he said, as he kidded around with Graham. “I was doing the Skip Barber National Championship in the States and the Ontario Formula Ford championship up here. I learned a lot about race craft in the Skip Barber because there was a lot of drafting that resulted in really close racing. Formula Ford was a lot more technical and you could learn a lot about setting up the car and what you had to do to make it work. That has proved to be invaluable as my career has progressed.”
Graham said Derek Daly made the right move when he went Conor north for tutoring.
“I think he saw that there were really good, strong fields in our series and that he could learn a lot,” he said. “We were 30-car grids and great competition most weekends. We had a great mix of young guys and veterans. It was a really good era of 1600 racing.” Graham — who also coached Newgarden as well as support series drivers Dalton Kellett and Scott Hargrove, all of whom are racing in Toronto this weekend — said he realized Daly had a ton of talent when he arrived and enjoyed working with him to help him become a better driver.
“He was very quick but he was a terrible starter,” he said. “He always lost spots at the start of a race. And then by mid-race, he’d be the fastest car on the track but he’d made himself a lot of work.
“We worked on that and worked on that. In the end, he figured it out. At the end of the year, he went on a run of five consecutive wins, basically from pole or off-pole, and that experience has made him one of the best starters.”
Graham’s lone regret is that they didn’t work harder to help Daly win two championships in two countries in one year.
“He had to miss one race in the Ontario championship,” Graham said. “There was a conflicting event — a Skip Barber race at Road America in Wisconsin — on the same day there was an Ontario Formula Ford Series race at Mosport (now Canadian Tire Motorsport Park). It ultimately cost him the Ontario championship.
“We talked about him trying to get back from Wisconsin in time to start our race at the back (where he would have had to go if he didn’t go through official qualifying). In the end, we decided it was too much trouble. I’m sorry today we didn’t go ahead and do that because he lost the championship by 16 points and he would have won it if he’d started the race.”
For Daly, it’s been a struggle of late. Despite being called upon to pinch hit for Hinchcliffe two weeks ago in Detroit (he finished 19th and sixth in the two races there) and now in Toronto, he has nothing more lined up in IndyCar between now and the end of the year. He has some sports car rides lined up in the TUDOR United SportsCar Championship but nothing beyond that.
“It’s so tough to fight for a career here, to fight for a job,” he said. “This is my only race that I’ve got left in the deal so far, so I just have to make the best of every day I’m in the car.
“I don’t know what Haas (Gene Haas, NASCAR team owner with Tony Stewart who’s launching a Formula One team in 2016) is going to do. We’ve been in touch, but that’s all. I would love to be involved. If they feel like having American drivers, which I think would make sense, we’ll see what happens.
“But I’m available.”