How a single-car team is turning the tide in IndyCar

If it escaped anyone's notice that Carlin has been over-performing for a one-car IndyCar team, Conor Daly hammered it home in decisive style at Iowa Speedway last Friday, when he took pole for race one and third for race two. That he ended up only eighth and 13th in the races was not irrelevant, but shouldn't detract from the fact that this third-year team is punching above its weight.

Those who have admired the squad since its inception in 1996 won't be entirely surprised that it is excelling in a spec formula, but the fact that Trevor Carlin's squad is belying the obvious detriment of having just one source of data coming in - on gruellingly rapid-fire race weekends too - is testament to this squad's core strength.

This writer was among many who worried about the future of Carlin in US open-wheel racing last autumn. A rival team owner and team manager both asked me whether the team would continue because they'd heard Carlin was trying to sell his IndyCar chassis and parts. Trevor assured me the stories were fabrications, but still, that second IndyCar season had been difficult enough to the point where it wouldn't have been inconceivable to discover substance to the rumours.

The squad had been through six drivers, for various reasons, and the best result had been a sixth place for Daly at Gateway, after team incumbent Max Chilton decided to quit any oval racing that wasn't the Indianapolis 500.

"If only they could have kept Pato O'Ward all year," said one observer, after the Mexican went off to race in Formula 2 and Super Formula last year. "He did enough in just a few races to show Carlin's got what it takes at this level. And it would have done O'Ward some good to have that Carlin common sense approach drilled into him as a rookie. From everything I've heard about that team in Europe, Trevor knows how to preach self-discipline to these kids, right?"

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Right. But Carlin's current drivers don't need to be told that talent alone is not going to land big results. Whatever might have been said in the past about Daly's commitment, he's taking his 2020 season - the first in which the son of former Grand Prix driver and six-times Indy 500 starter Derek will get to compete in every IndyCar race - very seriously indeed.

The 28-year-old's road course and Indy 500 programme with Ed Carpenter Racing, and his 'other oval' programme with Carlin are reaping the benefits of this head-down approach. As for Chilton, he has several reasons to not bother with racing, yet does so because he loves it - and shows a dedication and drive that not everyone in his situation could muster.

But the team itself is also strong, and appears to have taken huge strides since the end of 2019. Team manager at Carlin's Florida-based arm is Colin Hale, who spent 15 years in Formula 1 with Benetton and then Renault before joining Carlin's GP2 (now F2) squad as team manager, and then moving to the U.S. when Carlin started up his Indy Lights squad in 2015.

Ask Hale what's behind the off-season breakthrough that allowed Daly to stun everyone at Iowa Speedway, land a sixth at Texas Motor Speedway, and for Chilton to outqualify the likes of Alexander Rossi, Ryan Hunter-Reay and Simon Pagenaud at the Grand Prix of Indianapolis, and he points to a combination of factors.

"I still don't have all the people I should have here due to the issues of getting people into the country, so it does mean that we have a very strong core of people focusing on one car each weekend" Colin Hale

"I don't think it's one specific thing, to be honest," says Hale (pictured below in 2018). "It's no secret that we changed direction with our damper program midway through last year which certainly helped, but other than that I think it's just been a case of finding time to focus on various areas that we weren't able to do over our first couple of years in IndyCar.

"Remember, at the start of 2018 with the new aerokit, everything was running pretty late in terms of getting our hands on the cars, and so the priority was to shake the cars down and then head off to the first race. Now we've had a chance to work on areas that we simply didn't have enough time to look at before.

"Our engineers now have a better understanding of the car and the tyres, and we've been utilising the Chevrolet simulator in Charlotte [North Carolina] a lot. We've done some good rig testing over the winter, too. And so all that combined has given the engineers a really good sense of the direction we need to go.

"I think Max is also like a new character this year, too. He sees there's potential in the car, that's given him a new lease of life and he's going the extra work as well."

It's one thing for a team to catch up with many of its rivals if the cars are staying the same, but with the aeroscreen arriving in 2020 to change the weight distribution and balance of the car, Carlin was also chasing a moving target.

"A lot of credit should be given to Pratt & Miller and Chevrolet for supplying us good figures to work from," says Hale. "But I think our team both here and back in England have been doing a good job in understanding those figures and interpreting them."

At the track, it can't be emphasised enough how tough it is in newly compressed weekend schedules for a one-car team to compete with multi-car efforts. Thus Carlin's pace so far in 2020 would suggest that both Daly and Chilton are providing reliable feedback.

"If I had a choice, we'd be running another car," says Hale. "In an ideal world, it would be great to double the data coming in, and if we get the opportunity, I'm sure we will do.

"But I still don't have all the people I should have here due to the issues of getting people into the country, so it does mean that we have a very strong core of people focusing on one car each weekend. At the end of the day, that's what we've got and so we make the best of it because we have no option.

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"Where we are with Conor is a result of the hard work we put in when we had him last year. He did Texas with us just a couple of weeks after driving the Indy 500 for Andretti Autosport, who produce some of the best superspeedway cars out there. It did take us a while to get the car more dialled in for his liking through Texas into Iowa and Gateway, but we made strides at every one and that gave us a good starting point for this year. Conor knows what he wants and relays it very well, very clearly to the engineers.

"Max uses his experience well, too. He knows what a change we do in pitlane will do to the handling of the car, and he has a good relationship with the engineers who are pretty tuned in to what he needs from a car on any given track.

"Over the years - I worked with him in GP2 as well - I've seen his contribution grow in terms of what he brings to a technical meeting, and how confident he is to speak up and help improve the car. And I'm pleased he's seeing that work rewarded with speed. Hopefully, the results will come soon, too."

Even acknowledging the fact that Daly has become very good at saying what he needs from an oval car, there's still no denying that seeing him vying for pole position with Team Penske at Iowa came as a a surprise, even to Hale.

"I never expected us to be in that position!" he laughs. "But we'd done a sim session a couple of days before and that had gone well; we found some gains over last year. And you hope that what you find in a sim translates to the track, and in the Friday practice, it seemed like it had.

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"But still, I never go into qualifying with a great deal of optimism because you're competing against a lot of very good teams and a lot of very good drivers, and they have the same basic equipment as us. So when Conor did that first lap [resulting in pole for Friday evening's race] I was as surprised as anybody, and there was very little drop-off in his second lap [third on the grid for Saturday's race].

"Multi-car teams will typically divide up a practice session, so that one or two of their drivers work on qualifying setups and one or two work on race setups. With everyone basically qualifying their race car, they didn't have that advantage over a single-car team" Colin Hale

"But we were somewhere in the middle of the qualifying list and looking at which cars were still to come, I thought we'd end up top six or top eight. So that just goes to show you how good Conor's run was; he had that confidence in the car to get on with it right from the word go, unlike some of the guys who were still feeling the car out on the first lap and then did a better second lap.

"I think Conor felt he had something to prove because he'll be the first to admit he didn't really maximise the car in qualifying at Texas (19th on the grid), so at Iowa he certainly put that right!

"I think in our favour were the parc ferme rules that meant we couldn't change the car's setup between qualifying and race, so we had to qualify with a race setup. I think the multi-car teams will typically divide up a practice session, so that one or two of their drivers work on qualifying setups and one or two work on race setups. With everyone basically qualifying their race car, they didn't have that advantage over a single-car team; parc ferme sort of levelled the playing field."

Hale can put as modest a take on it as he wishes, but don't let the lowly end results for Daly (eighth and 13th) be Carlin's legacy from Iowa. Car #59 was a frontrunner in both races, Daly looked a match for pretty much everyone except Newgarden and he just got unlucky with how team strategy and caution periods meshed.

The Carlin team in IndyCar is starting to look like the Carlin team in Europe and the UK. That should worry its rivals, and please the objective IndyCar fan.