TORONTO – He only led seven laps – one less than he had combined this season – but Mike Conway nailed his timing Sunday en route to his win in the second race of the Honda Indy Toronto weekend for the Verizon IndyCar Series.
Conway started 11th in the No. 20 Fuzzy’s Vodka Chevrolet but made the call on Lap 43 to switch from wet weather tires onto slicks. That ultimately proved the winning call as the quiet but talented Englishman delivered his second win of the year for Ed Carpenter Racing.
“The conditions today were really tricky, with the rain and dry in places,” Conway said post-race. “I knew I just didn’t want to push too hard or risk anything at that point and I knew people were going to try to get by me, and I was going to fight as much as I could but not have the chance of going off.
“So I had to play it smart and make the moves when I could and you could see the cars going off and making mistakes, so easy to do here in a tenth of a second too late on the brakes, something can easily go wrong. So I had to be calm and seize my moment.”
Few drivers might have been better prepared for a single day doubleheader quite like Conway, who along with his open-wheel duties this year is Toyota Racing’s official reserve driver in the FIA World Endurance Championship. He hasn’t raced much this year due to his planned FIA WEC race program, an LMP2 effort with Millennium Racing, was halted preseason due to funding woes.
But Conway could have looked at Sunday’s pair of races in Toronto as separate stints in an endurance race, as he’s dovetailed sports car racing along with his road and street course starts in IndyCar since 2013. Essentially it was one full stint, a four-hour or so break, and then back in the car for race two.
“I suppose with having a seat in an endurance car, maybe it’s pretty helpful, the changing conditions, but IndyCar is the same thing. And these races are so tricky,” he said. “The first half of the race you’ve got to be smart really and it’s so true, you’ve got to not make any mistakes and let the race come to you a little bit, and it seems to happen that way.”
If ECR has been opportunistic, they certainly haven’t missed their chances to win. Combined, the team’s third win between Conway and Ed Carpenter equals them with Andretti Autosport for the second most number of wins this year. Only Team Penske, with four wins between its three drivers, has more this season in IndyCar.
“We had won before as a team, so I personally felt like we had better cars on road and street courses than what I was able to show,” Carpenter explained. “The cars were better than I was.
“We’re trying to grow this for the team and get results for our partners, and it’s been nice to be able to do that more consistently so far this year,” he added. “Mike’s one hell of a racer. It’s about him leading races. When you get him in position, when we do a good enough job or today him making the right call, when he gets in those positions he elevates his game and rises to the occasion.”
They did that to cap off the Toronto weekend.