Yahoo Autos Conor Daly Relishes Successes of Long-Awaited Rookie Season
In 2011, Conor Daly began the then-Firestone Indy Lights Series with a win and a runner-up finish in his first three races, bringing him to an early championship lead over teammate and fellow series rookie Josef Newgarden. He would leave the series by race four, however, moving to Europe and the Formula 1 ladder in GP3. Newgarden would go on to win the championship that season, and thanks to the notoriety earned from the series, find himself in a Sarah Fisher Racing IndyCar entry in 2012. Daly, however, would struggle in his inaugural GP3 season, finishing in the points just three times en route to a 17th place finish in the final standings. He would stay in Europe for three more seasons, delaying his full season IndyCar debut to 2016, four seasons after his would-be feeder series rival was a rookie.
That 2011 season was a turning point in the careers of what were then two of the U.S.'s most coveted up-and-coming open wheel prospects, and the decision to go to Europe is something Daly thinks about "Every day," he told Road & Track. "I'll always remember after, after I was leading the championship in Indy Lights and I was just about to go over to England to be there the rest of the summer and Graham Rahal called me and he's like, 'Are you sure you want to do this? You are the guy right now to possibly make it to IndyCar', but I've gotta take a chance when I can."
Four years later, he finds himself in a similar situation to Newgarden in his rookie season, running for a small Honda team that held few expectations before the season began. Like Newgarden, his results have been up-and-down throughout the season, but while the lows have been equally low (both failed to finish the Indianapolis 500), the highs have been higher, with Daly's pattern of occasional strong finishes more closely representing the Ed Carpenter Racing driver's sophomore season. A combination of innovative strategy from Dale Coyne Racing and strong driving when put in a position to go head-to-head with the top drivers in the series by Daly has earned the Coyne team five finishes of sixth or better, including a runner-up finish at Detroit, and 56 total laps led over the course of the season.
"It's hard to set expectations, I didn't really set expectations for myself. I knew it was going to be a really cool battle against two F1 guys, [Alexander] Rossi and [Max] Chilton, for rookie of the year, and they're obviously with two massive, powerhouse teams, so I love that competition, I love the whole series because it has so much competition," Daly said. "My goal is to improve every race, to do things better, and we've sort of done that every race, apart from having failures and random things happening, being in the wrong place at the wrong time. There's been a lot of bad luck, like, really bad luck, but there's been a lot of good luck as well, good use of strategy, time, and racecraft. I'm really happy with it. I really wanted to get on the podium, we were able to do that, then I wanted to win a race, and now we've only got one race to do that.
"I have to look at other rookies, I like to use Josef Newgarden as a good yardstick because he's obviously now the most coveted driver in IndyCar. I look at how his first couple years were and it just shows you that it takes time, this is not easy what we do here. It was the same for me in GP3, it just takes time. Most people who are winning GP2 championships do it in their, like, nineteenth year, or their fourth year. The fact that we've got on podiums, the fact that we've led a lot of laps for Honda, I'm really happy with [the season] overall."
Daly will start the final race of his rookie season from 21st on the grid, and though double points for the season finale make moving ahead of Alexander Rossi or behind Max Chilton an outside mathematical possibility, he's likely to finish second in the year's rookie-of-the-year standings. If he maintains his position in the overall standings, he'll finish sixteenth, in front of the likes of Marco Andretti and Takuma Sato and well ahead of Newgarden's rookie finish of 23rd.
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