With the NTT IndyCar Series season now over, Conor Daly is looking forward to continue racing in 2022, especially in a stock car. On Thursday, Daly announced he will make his NASCAR Cup Series début at the Charlotte Motor Speedway Roval on 9 October. He will drive the #50 Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 of The Money Team Racing.
Daly is coming off a seventeenth-place points finish in his ninth season of IndyCar competition. Driving for Ed Carpenter Racing, he scored a best finish of fifth at the Indianapolis GMR Grand Prix. It is his third straight year as a full-time IndyCar driver, having spent the previous two seasons splitting between ECR and Carlin.
Although much of his career has been in the open-wheel ladder, including racing for the GP3 and GP2 Series championships, he began dabbling in NASCAR in 2018 with a start at Road America in the Xfinity Series but retired in thirty-first with a mechanical failure. In 2020 and 2021, he entered the Camping World Truck Series races at Las Vegas and respectively finished eighteenth and last (the latter due to a crash). Despite his road course background, both Truck starts came on an oval.
Daly posted on social media, “Extremely excited to announce I’ll be making my NASCAR Cup series debut next weekend at the Roval in Charlotte! Huge thank you to BitNile Holdings and Todd Ault for making this happen with TMT Racing!”
The Money Team Racing is a new operation for the 2022 Cup season, owned by boxing legend Floyd Mayweather Jr. Kaz Grala débuted the #50 at the Daytona 500 with a twenty-sixth, followed by twenty-fifth at COTA and twenty-third on Charlotte’s oval.
Although Daly already had NASCAR experience prior to 2022, his entry continues an ongoing wave of open-wheel regulars entering the discipline. Kimi Räikkönen and Daniil Kvyat also made their maiden Cup starts this year after previously racing in Formula One, while 1995 IndyCar champion and 1997 F1 titlist Jacques Villeneuve ran the Daytona 500. Daly’s IndyCar colleague Marco Andretti will run the Xfinity Roval race on 8 October against Kvyat.