- Conor Daly signed a multiyear deal to drive full-time for Dreyer & Reinbold Racing starting in 2027, ending a year spent without a permanent IndyCar seat.
- The 34 year old Indianapolis native is a second generation racer whose father, Derek Daly, raced in Formula 1 and IndyCar before him.
- The deal also marks DRR’s first full-time IndyCar season in 14 years, three months after longtime team owner Dennis Reinbold died of cancer at 65.
A driver who spent 2026 waiting for a phone to ring
Conor Daly has made 133 IndyCar starts. He has a second place finish at Detroit, a pole at Iowa, six top fives and 26 top tens, numbers built up across more than a decade in a series that rarely rewards loyalty with security. None of it guaranteed him a car for 2026. Daly went into this season without a full-time ride, the kind of gap that quietly ends careers for drivers with far less to show for themselves than he has.
Instead of disappearing, he found a lifeline where he has found one before. Dreyer & Reinbold Racing offered him a seat for the 2026 Indianapolis 500, his second start with the team after 2024. He finished 12th and led 26 laps, a solid but unspectacular afternoon that turned out to matter more than the result suggested. It was an audition, whether either side called it that or not, and Daly passed.
The announcement that changes everything
On September 5, DRR announced Daly had signed a multiyear agreement to drive the team’s new full-time No. 24 entry beginning in 2027. Honda engines come with him, marking the team’s return to a manufacturer it last used between 2005 and 2011. The deal followed DRR’s July purchase of an NTT IndyCar Series charter from Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing, the paperwork that made a full season financially possible for the first time in 14 years, going back to Oriol Servia’s lone entry in 2012.
“I am extremely grateful to get back to full-time INDYCAR racing with my friends at Dreyer and Reinbold Racing and Honda,” Daly said. “The faith that this group has shown in me is something that makes me want to work harder than ever before to deliver.”
DRR CEO Derek Reinbold explained why Daly was the obvious choice for a team betting its comeback season on one driver. “Conor has raced for us at Indianapolis, so we know how he prepares, how he works with engineers and how much he gets out of a car. He has shown for years that he can win the Indianapolis 500, and our job is to give him a car that lets him do it. We are building a team that contends every weekend, and Conor is the driver we trust to carry that effort across the full season. An Indiana driver in an Indiana team’s car is exactly how we want to come back.”
Racing was never really a choice for Daly
Daly grew up around race cars the way other kids grow up around a family business. It was one. His father, Derek Daly, raced in Formula 1 for Tyrrell, March and Williams in the early 1980s before moving to IndyCar, where he built a career good enough to earn a spot in the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Hall of Fame Museum. Conor debuted in the Indianapolis 500 in 2013, the same race that made his father’s name, and has spent the thirteen years that followed trying to turn a famous last name into a career that stands on its own.
That career has taken a winding path. Daly won the Star Mazda title in 2010, tested a Formula 1 car for Force India, won a GP3 race at Barcelona and became the first ever champion of India’s MRF Challenge Series. He has driven for a long list of IndyCar teams over the years, including Coyne, Carpenter, Carlin, Meyer Shank and, most recently, Juncos Hollinger Racing in 2025. What he had never had, for a driver with his resume, was a stable multi year home. DRR is offering him exactly that at 34, an age when most drivers without a full-time seat are being quietly written out of IndyCar’s future rather than handed a fresh multi year deal.
A team rebuilding around loss
The return to full-time competition arrives under circumstances DRR did not choose. Dennis Reinbold, who built the team from nothing in 1999 and ran it for 27 years while also operating Volkswagen, BMW, Infiniti and Subaru dealerships across Indianapolis, died June 13 after a battle with cancer. He was 65. Reinbold had appeared to be improving before a sudden turn for the worse, according to people close to the team, a detail that made his death land especially hard inside the shop he built.
The team’s name pays tribute to an even earlier generation. Reinbold named it after his grandfather, Floyd “Pop” Dreyer, who went from factory motorcycle racer to chief mechanic on the Duesenberg driven by Benny Shoaff and Babe Stapp in the 1927 Indianapolis 500. DRR has fielded a car in the 500 every year starting in 2000, with 58 different drivers making the field for the team across a quarter century, a record built on family continuity rather than any single season of results.
That continuity now runs through Derek Reinbold, who has taken over as CEO and is steering the team into its biggest financial commitment in over a decade only months after burying his father. Daly’s own language about the deal reflected that history without ever naming it outright, speaking about honoring the group’s faith in him and working to justify it every week of the season rather than just at the Indianapolis 500.
What a full season actually means for Daly
IndyCar drivers who bounce between part-time rides rarely get the chance to build real momentum. A single bad qualifying session or a strategy call gone wrong can define an entire season when there are only a handful of races to make an impression. A full calendar changes the math entirely. It gives a driver like Daly the ability to absorb a rough month at one track and answer for it three weeks later somewhere else, the kind of runway that turns a solid career into a truly competitive one.
It also puts real pressure on both sides to deliver. DRR has not fielded a full-time entry in the 14 years that followed Servia’s lone 2012 campaign, meaning the entire technical and race operations side of the team has to be rebuilt largely from scratch, even with the Rahal charter smoothing the transition. Daly, for his part, has spent a career known as one of IndyCar’s most engaging personalities off the track and a capable, occasionally spectacular driver on it. A full season gives him the chance to close the gap between those two reputations.
An Indiana story, built by Indiana people
Every piece of this deal traces back to the same six mile stretch of central Indiana. Daly grew up in Noblesville. DRR is based in Indianapolis. The team’s dealerships, its charter, its name and now its full-time driver all belong to the same small, tightly connected racing community that treats the Indianapolis 500 as less a race than a civic institution. Derek Reinbold said as much when he confirmed the signing, calling Daly in an Indiana driver in an Indiana team’s car exactly how the organization wanted to return to full-time competition.
For Daly, 2027 will be his 15th IndyCar season. For DRR, it will be a test of whether a team built on family legacy and 25 years centered on one spring race can hold up across an entire calendar without the man who built it there to see how it turns out. Both answers arrive together, in a Honda powered No. 24 car that neither side is treating as anything less than a fresh start.
Sources:
- https://www.indycar.com/news/2026/09/09-05-daly-drr-2027
- https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/dreyer-reinbold-chooses-conor-daly-184258177.html
- https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/dennis-reinbold-owner-dreyer-reinbold-205410376.html
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucemartin/2026/09/05/indycars-conor-daly-gets-full-season-ride-with-dreyer–reinbold/
