INDIANAPOLIS — Conor Daly is preparing to make his 13th Indianapolis 500 start and through testing and the first two days of practice at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Daly has had one of the fastest and most consistent cars.
Daly and teammate Jack Harvey are driving one-off entries for Dreyer & Reinbold Racing, which continues to amaze with its performance at Indianapolis despite not running any other Indy car races.
Daly also drove for Dreyer & Reinbold in 2024.
“I think these guys have come a completely full step forward from where I was in ’24,” Daly said Wednesday evening. “We still had a really good race car in ’24. The car is fast, and that’s some of the hardest things to get out of the car is just raw speed.
“It just feels good. We’re able to kind of do a lot with it. We can start deep in the pack and kind of mess around with some good cars and do some overtaking. But, yeah, I’m so impressed with what they do, honestly,” Daly added. “The fact that if you can stay focused during the offseason and use all those months to dial in your package here to be as fast as we’ve been in the first three days in this car, I mean, I think it’s a great sign for anyone who wants to show up to try to compete at this race if you’re full-time or not.”
Daly said things are going according to plan with a lot of pack running on the first two days before changing focus toward qualifying on Thursday and Friday.
“We kind of got through our plan of running through three sets of tires. I mean, that’s kind of what you’re limited to per day if we have good weather, so that’s why it kind of gets a little quiet, I would say, from time to time,” Daly said. But, yeah, our car is fast. It just feels really good. So just kind of driving around and working through a few small things and, yeah, just tuning to kind of what I want and evaluating a few other things.”
The 34-year-old Indianapolis native has a ride for only one race this season — the 110th Indy 500.
“Yeah, it sucks. Man, there’s no way around it,” Daly said. “I really feel like I’m driving well at this point in my life and really enjoying my time out there. But, yeah, all I can control is what I can control, right? What we’ve got is these next two weeks in front of us, and the car is really fast.
“If you win the Indy 500, life is good. So doesn’t matter what happens after that because we’ll have a bunch of milk, and that’s really the best part. So we’ll see what happens.”
