NASCAR Cup Series championship crew chief Cole Pearn will be the lead engineer on Conor Daily’s #47 Ed Carpenter Racing team for the Indianapolis 500, scheduled for Aug. 23.
“I am really excited to get to work with Cole for the first time at the Indy 500,” Daly said. “We’re both going to have to get up to speed with this ECR operation, but I can’t wait. Cole has had an incredible amount of success in the NASCAR world and now we’ll be going for our first Indy 500 win together.”
Pearn will be reunited with Pete Craik, lead engineer on ECR’s #20 team. Pearn and Craik worked together at Furniture Row Racing in the Cup Series.
“I am super excited to get a chance to compete in the Indianapolis 500 with Conor Daly and Ed Carpenter Racing,” Pearn said. “I wasn’t sure when I would want to get back to racing, but this is a great opportunity to do so. To be able to do it at a high level was too hard to pass up. Obviously, it will be a steep learning curve, but getting to work with Pete Craik again and the rest of the ECR team is about the best situation I could hope for.”
Pearn was crew chief for Martin Truex Jr. at Furniture Row Racing and, together, they won the 2017 Cup Series championship. After Furniture Row Racing closed its doors at the end of the 2018 season, Pearn moved with Truex to Joe Gibbs Racing for 2019. He retired from NASCAR at the end of his lone season with JGR.
Daly is racing splitting time between Ed Carpenter Racing and Carlin in 2020, contesting the Indy 500 and the IndyCar road and street-course races with ECR and the other oval races with Carlin. He is 14th in the series standings, six races into the season, including two top-10 finishes at Texas Motor Speedway and Iowa Speedway, both with Carlin.
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