Aspiring Verizon IndyCar Series driver Conor Daly is used to this by now: just another day pursuing a contract for a full-time ride in the upcoming 2015 season. On Tuesday, however, the 23-year-old Indiana native was back to working a steering wheel rather than a telephone, testing for IndyCar team Schmidt Peterson Motorsports at Florida’s Sebring International Raceway. And while he still doesn’t hold a contract to race for anyone when the IndyCar season begins on March 29 in St. Petersburg, Fla., he is confident he proved a point.

“It went really, really well,” Daly told Autoweek on Wednesday. “I did everything I possibly could. I was able to set competitive times alongside [regular SPM driver] James [Hinchcliffe] for the majority of the day, and we were two of the quicker cars on the track. We made a lot of progress with the car, and working with the team was really good. Hinch is one of my best friends, so it was cool to have the opportunity to work alongside him. And we pushed each other and ended up being pretty quick. From my standpoint, it almost couldn’t have gone any better.

“You always have things you can improve, small bits, but I drove at the highest level I have in a long time.”

With no official lap timing in place for the Sebring test, and with different teams and drivers running different programs, “It wasn’t just overall speed,” Daly continued. “They wanted me to do a long run and save fuel and see if I could maintain lap time, since so many IndyCar races require you to save fuel. [The team] thought I adapted to it extremely well, and they were happy because that’s something you need to do in the race. And I was happy because I had never really done that before.”

Prior to Tuesday's IndyCar test at Sebring, Daly hadn't driven a race car in anger since the 2014 GP2 Series finale in Abu Dhabi (above) in November. LAT PHOTO

A big challenge, then, especially considering this was his first time driving an IndyCar since the 2013 Indianapolis 500?

“It’s difficult to figure out,” he said. “It’s a whole new technique, it’s a different way to drive. But for me, that’s always fascinating because you see Scott Dixon and Simon Pagenaud, those guys know how to ‘make’ fuel essentially. It was cool to do.”

Cool, yes, but this wasn’t about having fun. Daly knew going in he had to perform at a high level.

“The test mainly came about because Sam’s always expressed interest in me and having me there, and James was very positive in kind of encouraging Sam to give me a shot, so we worked this deal out,” he said. “It’s one of those things where I can’t just be talked about all the time, I have to kind of force my way in here.”

In terms of his speed, Daly was spot-on at Sebring, matching Hinchcliffe throughout the day. Still -- illustrating the challenge of trying to make it in professional open-wheel racing -- he is again home in Indiana, wondering once more what the future holds.

“What happens as of this moment, I really don’t know,” he said. “In a sense, it was an audition, but as always it might just come down to who has the money. I went there and did the best I could and impressed them. [However] there’s always a money component, and I don’t have that. But if there’s an opportunity that Sam thinks they can pull together, there’s a shot. The test was the first step. As of today, I just don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Perhaps it is of small consolation at the moment, but the weight and pressure of expectations about Daly’s actual driving performance have lifted, at least as much as they ever lift for competitive racers trying to make their names.

“A test situation like this is one of the hardest things to do as a driver because you know you have to do well, you know you have to perform, this is your only shot,” he admitted. “And by the end of the morning session, I had done a time within two-hundredths of James, so I was there. Even by midway through the morning, we were already working through some of the [bigger-picture] test plans, so I was proud of that. It was good to work with the team, a good environment which I really enjoyed.

“The car? I mean, it’s a big, fast race car. So any time you get into something like that, you’re trying to learn at such a high rate of speed because you’ve only got one day, but you just have to do the best you can. It isn’t one thing in particular, it’s everything. You have to trust the car, how it grips the track, the Firestone tires -- I hadn’t driven on Firestones since the 2013 Indy 500 and that was an oval, so just stuff like that.”

That’s why Daly commented at Sebring that he had never prepared so hard for any other day in his life.

“For me it’s just get all the information you’re allowed to get,” he said a day later. “How to warm up the tires, how to prepare, how [to do] the first laps before you do the fast lap, get the data printouts and understand everything about the car before you even leave the pits. You want to be at a high level before you even step into the car. I spent three days at the shop with the team getting fitted, talking with the engineers, kind of the general car setup and more. It’s just about knowing as much as you possibly can before you even set foot in the car so you aren’t overwhelmed by anything when you get out there.”

Daly on Tuesday crossed those objectives off the board.

“Now it’s not just people talking about it anymore,” he reiterated. “I physically went out there and proved ‘OK, hang on a second, he can actually do it.’”

The question remains: Now what?

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