Conor Daly Discusses Xfinity Opportunity with Sam Hunt Racing & Future Plans

Born in nearby Noblesville, Ind., Conor Daly is no stranger to Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

The NTT IndyCar Series veteran has made 11 starts in the Indianapolis 500, with three consecutive top 10s and a finish of sixth in 2022.

Daly — who has 110 IndyCar starts to his name — has also acquired a sizeable stock car resume in recent years. He made his NASCAR Xfinity Series debut at Road America in 2018 and has made a total of 10 starts in NASCAR’s top three series.

This season is set to be Daly’s busiest NASCAR schedule yet, with three Craftsman Truck Series races currently scheduled with Niece Motorsports. His itinerary also got a surprise extension earlier this month, as he had the opportunity to compete on the Indianapolis oval for the first time with Sam Hunt Racing’s Xfinity program.

“The opportunity [with SHR] was kind of random,” Daly told Frontstretch. “We had this program with Polkadot — our partner here — where we were going to do a couple of Truck races, and we had some budget that was kind of leftover. My manager Andrew was speaking to Sam [Hunt] and just like, ‘What’s possible?’ And when he said Indy, we were like, ‘Well, it’s kind of hard to not want to go after that one.’

“We were able to kind of put this program together, pretty quickly actually. … I was in Charlotte a couple of weeks ago for another seat fit in the sports car that I was driving this week and went over to Sam’s shop and just started talking, [and] sure enough, we did the deal. Pretty cool to be able to get to do it, especially [at Indy]. I love it here. I was excited to see that Xfinity and Cup were coming back to the oval.”

Daly immediately impressed in Friday’s (July 19) practice session, as he posted the third fastest time and qualified 16th the next day. But while he had plenty of experience with open wheel cars on the oval to assist, the stock cars were a whole new ballgame. For starters, the average speeds of the Xfinity cars in practice and qualifying were approximately 70 mph slower than the ones seen in Indy 500 qualifying earlier this year.

“[The stock car] is just a different art form,” Daly said. “… It’s obviously much less downforce, much less power, because there’s not a ton of banking here, right? And every corner is different; it’s a bit of a different battle per corner. It’s kind of a fun challenge, because you’re almost flat in some of the corners and then you have to lift in a couple, but you have to time the lifts perfectly.

“As a driver, it’s actually quite a challenge, because with these cars, from what I’ve learned in my 50 minutes in the car, if you miss [the corner], it’s a big penalty. Like, if you just get a little bit too tight, it’s a big penalty. It forces us to work really hard on just perfecting everything, [like] turn-ins. That’s where I think track experience helps me a little bit here probably.”

Despite suffering nose damage in a lap 1 crash, Daly spent 78% of the race inside the top 15 and brought the No. 26 car home with a solid 14th-place finish — the best of his NASCAR career.

The Xfinity race wasn’t his only time on track during the Indy weekend, as he also made his first Truck start of the year for Niece on Friday night at the nearby Lucas Oil Indianapolis Raceway Park. Unfortunately, that start didn’t go as planned, as Daly finished three laps down after suffering a flat tire just past the halfway point.

“Man, (that) was fun until it wasn’t,” Daly said. “We had a great run going on about the middle of the race after the second stage. I think we restarted and we passed like 10 cars. My spotter was pumped up, we were all jazzed up. My crew chief was pumped, and then the right front started going down.

“I don’t know how it happened, but we weren’t the only one — Corey Heim had it go down too. Clearly there was something going on out there. But yeah, I learned a lot, man, and still finished the race. We got a lot of experience, hadn’t done a short track before in a stock car. So that was a huge, huge learning experience for me.”

While Daly was full-time in IndyCar as recently as 2023, his current season has been a mix between part-time starts in NASCAR and IndyCar. He finished 10th in the Indy 500 with Dreyer & Reinbold Racing, and he made his second IndyCar start of the season in the second race of the Iowa Speedway doubleheader on July 14 as a late injury replacement for Dale Coyne Racing driver Jack Harvey.

While Daly’s start ended just after halfway with a mechanical failure, he got to run his first on the newly repaved Iowa surface — a surface that raised eyebrows and drew controversy from both the IndyCar and NASCAR aisles.

To start, the pole speed of the second race clocked in at a blistering 188 mph on the 7/8th mile track. The last pole speeds before the repave were only a hair above 181 mph.

“It was fast,” Daly said. “The physicality of Iowa now, with how fast we were going, is absurd. With how much downforce we have — and even though we had pretty low downforce package on — it was a challenge, man.”

But while the new repave turned the open wheel cars into rockets, the partial repave of the turns also had the unintended consequence of turning Iowa into a one-groove racetrack, with passing virtually impossible outside of a restart of pit road sequence.

“I hope we can find just a tire and downforce package that maybe suits the track a little bit better in the future,” Daly said. “I don’t believe it’s the track’s fault, right? I think we can make something work at that track, it’s just a matter of testing. We just got to figure out, what’s the best tire, what’s the best downforce package we can come back from.

“Because when it’s clean, like at the start, when you’re two-by-two, you could run up there. The problem is we create such a small debris field offline that we’re going so fast that you need all the grip you can get to try to go two-wide. It was interesting, but on the IndyCar side, I’m sure they’ll try to work on a different package for next year.”

Daly has no other IndyCar races scheduled beyond Iowa, but he has two upcoming Truck starts with Niece this fall: the first coming at Kansas Speedway on Sept. 27 and the second at Homestead-Miami Speedway on Oct. 26.

And while he grew up in the IndyCar fold and would love to have more starts in that series, Daly is setting his sights in any direction — including NASCAR — that allows him to maximize his time behind the wheel.

“To be honest with you, in my heart I have so much that I want to do in IndyCar still,” Daly said. “But that world has been a bit of a painful experience at times. There seems to be a lot of opportunity elsewhere in the world of racing, and if I can come into the NASCAR realm and just show, ‘Hey, this guy might be worth some time or effort to maybe do some races with,’ that would be really cool.

“I love motorsports. I watch everything, I enjoy everything. I’m an IndyCar guy at heart, but seeing what AJ Allmendinger has done with his career is a very inspirational thing, right? Because he was so good in open wheel cars, and this guy is so good in this [NASCAR] realm as well.”

Could we see Daly eventually make the transition to a full-time NASCAR career? If the sponsorship presents itself, don’t count it out.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future,” Daly said. “I would love to think that there is an opportunity; obviously, it’s all funding related. But if we were able to get the funding together, I would love to see what a full-time opportunity in the Xfinity Series would be like, or the Truck Series. We’ll just see, but obviously I can’t control my own destiny until we have the supporters behind us that can let us do that.”