Photo Credit: IndyCar.com
Conor Daly, driver of the No. 18 Jonathan Byrd’s Hospitality Honda, had the best race of his career with a top-10 performance.
His weekend didn’t really start out to well in each of the practices on Friday he was outside of the top-10, which carried over to qualifying as he’d post the 22nd quickest time. The potential was shown pre-race though, as in the warm up practice before the Angie’s List Grand Prix of Indianapolis at the road course at Indianapolis Motor Speedway he finished 10th.
When the green flag flew on the start of the race, he slowly moved up. Things played into his way, strategy-wise, as Daly had just made a green flag stop later in the race and a few laps after the caution came out. Daly’s owner, Dale Coyne who is his strategist, made the decision for him to stay out to restart second.
When they restarted the race, Daly quickly passed Castroneves for the lead and led 14 laps before he had to come down pit road for his final green flag pit stop of the race. He had used all his push to passes so he wasn’t able to get back to the front, but ended up finishing the race in the sixth position for his best finish of the 2016 season.
“It was a great effort from the team,” Daly said. They put us in the right place at the right time and thankfully I was able to get around Helio (Castroneves) on the restart and go from there. It was a crazy race, even after the last stop coming out in traffic was just so painful but we tried our best to work around it. When Graham (Rahal) got around me I had no more overtakes left. I was really helpless and our rear tires were going away and Charlie (Kimball) got a good run on us. The other manufacturer is really hard to keep up with on the straight so he was able to get me but I had to hold on to what we could do. We just lost the tires at the end. But it was awesome to lead laps at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. It’s a good way to kick off May here.”
