If you spent time in the Nitrocross paddock at the Visions Off-Road festival in Oklahoma last weekend, you will have spotted a familiar driver smiling from ear-to-ear. That smile that didn’t leave his face all week long, despite the fact that the event came just days after one of the toughest moments in his career.
That driver was Conor Daly, a man with more than 100 IndyCar races on his resume, along with a handful of NASCAR starts and a stint on the European open-wheel junior ladder.
Daly’s first on-track outing since his departure from Ed Carpenter Racing came in the Travis Pastrana-led series with Indy 500 runners Dreyer & Reinbold Racing. And while Daly’s interest in rallycross has been there since he tested a Honda Civic supercar at the end of 2016, his debut was put together rather quickly off the back of his IndyCar ousting.
“Well, in difficult times, your friends and people who really care about you help out, and Travis is one of those people,” Daly told RACER. “He connected some dots, Dennis [Reinbold] is a good friend of mine as well, they had an open seat and obviously when everything kicked off last week they were like ‘hey, we’ve gotta get Conor in this’ and that was really cool.
“It means a lot to have that support and to have them bring together sponsors that made this happen. Obviously that’s the only reason this happened, so it really means a lot that we were able to turn nothing into something really quickly.”
Daly entered the series’ headline all-electric Group E category with the reigning champion team, joining a field of seasoned rallycross, rallying, and off-road racing veterans. After spending his career racing in a number of circuit racing categories, it was a leap into the unknown.
“[It’s] just such a new environment,” he said. “[They’re] amazing cars. I’ve never really driven an electric car before. The power is pretty unbelievable and instantaneous, but the way the throttle is mapped, it still kinda feels like a regular race car with an engine.
“So it’s fascinating to kinda see how that works. Gearbox as well, and the jumps… but yeah, baptism by fire.”
That baptism came on an all-new track that is the most extravagant that the series has ever built, with a near-instantaneous steep drop from the starting grid, giant banked turns, and more than 150 feet of elevation change. It was crazy by rallycross terms – the discipline to which Nitrocross can trace its roots – but compared to the smoother-surfaced circuits Daly is used to, it was an entirely different universe.
“All the other drivers keep telling me this is one of the hardest places,” he said. “The track conditions were wild every single time.”
Elaborating on the transition from what he’s done for his whole career, Daly said: “I just don’t know enough about it yet. I have less than 40 laps here in one of these cars, so I just don’t know enough.
“When the track gets drier and it’s a little dusty and there’s not just a little bit of random water and wetness, I seem to be alright, driving smooth and kind of in-line and not sliding it like crazy, we’re really fast.
“There were definitely moments where I felt really fast, but in the final, when there was water off-line and in the braking zone, it just went from being able to drive to being backwards and I’ve no idea why, so all sense goes out the window.”
Nevertheless, Daly was able to show decent speed, getting quicker in every session to the point where he set the fastest lap in the LCQ – the penultimate race of the weekend – and in a Preliminary race, he was also able to go toe-to-toe with Pastrana, a driver and friend he’s competed with in NASCAR, but whose experience on the loose stuff vastly outweighs Daly’s.
“[It’s] cool to learn, cool to just be racing, and to make the final,” Daly said. “Making the final was the goal. There’s so many good drivers and good teams here so that was really cool.
“Every session we did, the better we got until the track just got really really strange, like in the final, and these guys are used to that. They’ve been in every condition before, so that was challenging. And I made some mistakes for sure, but I’m trying to push hard, trying to do well, and this team gave me a great opportunity.”
Back behind the wheel and goals achieved, it was a positive weekend for Daly, but what about going forward?
“I don’t know, honestly,” Daly admitted. “My life has been one day at a time since last week. I don’t know what’s next.
“I definitely still prefer circuit racing, I don’t know if this was my bread and butter, but I really did enjoy it and maybe track experience and when there is some pavement on some of the tracks, that can really help me. There’s obviously no pavement on this track and some of the other tracks they do have pavement, so maybe that is something that might really hook me.
“So we’ll see, I have no idea what the future holds, I’m taking life one day at a time at the moment.”
Pressed on whether he’ll be appearing at rounds two and three of Nitrocross in Utah on August 18-19, Daly said: “Who knows? There’s plenty of time to decide, thankfully.”
As for Indy, could this newfound working relationship with DRR stretch into the open-wheel realm? It’s unlikely, but Daly isn’t ruling it out yet.
“These guys have really only been set up to run Indy so I think it would be a real stretch to make anything happen there,” he said. “But it’s an amazing organization.
“All it takes is a giant influx of cash and it could happen, so we’ll see. But right now, anything on the IndyCar side, I’ve no idea.”