On a bright October morning in Arizona, Derek Daly is sitting in his kitchen, staring into a computer screen and reflecting on the many different lives that he has lived.
‘A lot of stuff has happened,’ Daly chuckles at one point as he discusses his 73 years on the planet. That’s a bit of an understatement.
He went from the young dreamer from Dundrum who somehow worked his way into Formula One before moving to the States and IndyCar; rebuilding his life after being involved in one of the most violent crashes in the history of the sport; before becoming the voice of motorsport in America and having to rebuild his career again after falling victim to cancel culture.
And there’s a whole lot more besides. No wonder his riveting autobiography, which Daly completed without a ghostwriter, is called Serial Survivor.
‘It couldn’t have been called anything else, from a young age, I have been forced into survival mode,’ he says over Zoom.
Having tried to arrange this interview for a while, on the day we talk, Daly’s son Conor is beginning testing ahead of next year’s Indycar season, but it’s another Irish driver who was causing a stir.
Daly has proven to be a useful sounding-board for Alex Dunne and his father as they negotiate the pitfalls within the world of motorsport, but he admits that he was surprised to hear the young Offaly man was over Stateside, testing for Indycar.
Having tried to arrange this interview for a while, on the day we talk, Daly’s son Conor is beginning testing ahead of next year’s Indycar season, but it’s another Irish driver who was causing a stir
‘I speak to his dad a lot, but I knew nothing about this. So, it was a surprise when it popped up on my feed this morning,’ Daly said.
‘I think Alex is Formula One material, without a doubt. If he does move to America and IndyCar and that’s his decision, I don’t want him to make it too early because I do genuinely believe he’s Formula One material, he is that good!’
Dunne will be following in Daly’s footsteps if he does make it to Formula One.
The Dubliner was the first driver from the Republic to win a world championship point and while driving for Williams in 1982, came close to winning the Monaco Grand Prix before being thwarted by engine failure.
In the normal career of any racing driver, reaching F1 should be the pinnacle, the endpoint. But in Daly’s life, it’s only a small part of the story.
‘With most driver autobiographies, especially those that have made it to Formula One, the book usually ends when their Formula One career ends.
‘But for me, it ended up being a chapter. When I was pushed out by Williams at the end of ’82, a whole new world opened up for me in America.
‘It’s something I never planned on, but I am a risk-taker so I just thought let’s take this opportunity and see where it leads.’
In only his second season as an Indycar driver, he crashed his car into the barrier in Michigan at over 350 km/p/h, an accident still considered one of the most violent in motorsport history.
In only his second season as an Indycar driver, he crashed his car into the barrier in Michigan at over 350 km/p/h, an accident still considered one of the most violent in motorsport history
Looking at photos, it is still difficult to believe that he survived.
Daly had been involved in crashes in Formula One, chronicling how after one in the Dutch Grand Prix, he experienced his life flashing before his eyes.
But Michigan was different. He wasn’t supposed to survive, and the natural instinct for many would have been to walk away from the sport.
‘It was a life-defining moment, changed the direction of my whole life,’ he says quietly of the accident.
‘I still manage the injuries every day. You have to, it just becomes a normal part of your life, that your feet and legs are constantly sore.
‘After an accident of that scale, most people would walk away. But I couldn’t do that because the accident would have been the legacy that I would leave in the sport.’
In the book, Daly outlines how his passion for motorsport – and his ‘mad dream’ to become a racing driver – originated in his dad bringing him to see a race in Dunboyne as a 12-year-old.
From the start, he was aware of the dangers of the sport as two competitors died that day.
‘My dad had told me when I was 12 to have a go and leave your mark and that meant you’re responsible for the legacy you leave.
‘I could never have my mark be that I was pushed out by an accident, so those words from my dad forced me back because I wanted to leave on my terms.
‘And I won the biggest international races of my career after my accident purely because I wanted to control how I left the sport.
‘It’s a bit illogical but that is the way I was wired, I was wired as a risk-taker and I am glad I did it.’
Daly was in therapy for more than three years, even after he was back competing. He had 19 operations over the course of 12 years.
Daly had been involved in crashes in Formula One, chronicling how after one in the Dutch Grand Prix, he experienced his life flashing before his eyes
‘When I crashed in Monaco in 1980, my mother said to me no matter what happens, things can always be worse.
‘And she came over to help me through therapy and told me that there is an awful lot of people worse off and they never had the crash of experiences in life that I had.’
As he was recovering from the crash, he also got his first taste of television.
He was still in a wheelchair when ESPN interviewed him during the final Indycar race of the season. The broadcasters liked what they saw.
‘I had no plans to go on television, didn’t know anything about it. And as I say in the book, I was doing an interview for ESPN in a wheelchair at the last race of the season while I was recovering from the crash.
‘And that interview turned into a 10-year contract.
‘And I never even thought about going on television. I had no experience of it. You are just thrown in at the deep end, have a producer talking in your ear while you are trying to talk to the camera, trying to tell the story.
‘But I had a natural ability to multitask and I had, as they say, the Irish gift of the gab, which stood me well through all those years in television.
‘ESPN told me they wanted me to be a colour commentator or colour analyst, and I had no idea what they meant. I never heard the term colour before, but they were going to pay me to travel the world to talk about racing cars and motorsport.
‘And it was a great experience, travelling the world, commentating on Formula One and Indycar. It was great, but of course, that ended in a mess,’ Daly says softly.
By 2018, Daly was far more famous as a television commentator than he ever was as a racing driver.
However, when controversy erupted about remarks that he made in a radio interview as a rookie Indycar driver in 1983, his world came crashing down.
A veteran sports commentator, Bob Lamey, who for four decades had been the voice of Indianapolis Colts, said in an off-microphone conversation that he had once heard a racing driver make a comment that he didn’t expect any go-slow tactics because ‘there aren’t any n****** in this race’.
A studio technician made a complaint and Lamey hastily retired from covering the Colts, a position he held for almost 40 years.
WISH-TV received a tip-off that the driver in question was Daly, who was their employee.
He denied the quote that Lamey had remembered but told them he had spoken of being ‘the n***** in the woodpile’, a commonly-used phrase in Ireland and the UK at the time, but not the United States, in relation to being a foreigner in Indycar.
Daly had to file a lawsuit against Lamey to get the full story out, but by that stage, the damage had been done.
‘It was cancel culture. Effectively, I was cancelled even though I got the full story out. I had to go through a lawsuit to get the whole story out there.
‘But it was very simple, in the end. An 80-year-old man just completely forgot what he thought he heard 35 years ago and accused me of a racial slur, which I never said.
‘But you can’t unring the bell. By the time they found out they were wrong and it was an erroneous accusation, it was too late.
‘The damage had been done. But I wanted to detail the whole stupidity of that episode in the book, because it was part of being a serial survivor. I had to come out the other end of it.’
It had consequences for his son Conor’s racing career, with some of his sponsors pulling out because of the controversy.
‘It did. Guilty by association. But thankfully, none of that lasted long once the absurdity of it all became evident to everyone.’
By 2018, Daly was far more famous as a television commentator than he ever was as a racing driver
Now, how does he look back on how an erroneous accusation of a racial slur ruined his television career?
‘I just look back on it as another of the experiences I had in my life. Something I just had to work through, absorb and come out the other end with my head held high, going on to bigger and better things.
‘And I do bigger keynote corporate speeches now than I ever did before.
‘I was never going to allow something like that define me because it was so absurd. But it happened and when something like that happens, that’s the test.
‘Reality can be a ruthless teacher at times, because it forces you into survival mode and that is what becomes a measure of what you are made of.’
Daly bypassed the idea of a ghostwriter because he says that he can still recall his career in HD detail, but he also was keen to ensure that the underlying message of the book was clear to his three sons.
‘That message is that you can survive almost anything, even almost being killed, depending on your mindset and how you approach things.
‘I have made every mistake there is to make, have fallen into every pitfall but have come back up from it. So, I hope that people understand you can survive anything.
‘And I hope this can be like a mentor in print for any young dreamer out there because that was all I was,’ Daly says, recalling how he told his father he wanted to be a racing car driver at 12 when at the time, in 1965, there were no tracks in the south.
‘All the drivers, and all the cars, came from the North and at the time, we didn’t even know where the North was. It might as well have been on the Moon. It was mad stuff.’
Even the idea of Daly and his friend David Kennedy leaving Dundrum at 20 and going to work in the iron ore mines in Australia in an effort to finance their dream of becoming racing drivers seems out there now.
But it led to an eventful life, one that he has captured in all its colour.
These days, he winters in Arizona and lives in Indianapolis during the summer and tries to come home to Ireland at least once a year to see his mother who, at 98, is still living in the family home in Dundrum.
And he remains obsessed with motorsport.
Even though his time in Formula One ended on bad terms, he has a good relationship with Williams and their team principal James Volves and he has been to the last two Monaco Grand Prix as guests of the team.
‘People ask me what Formula One team I follow and I suppose it is Williams. They have brought us over to Monaco the last two years.’
Of course, it’s Monaco where he almost won his only Grand Prix in 1982. ‘How different my life might have been if I had won that race,’ Daly wonders at one point.
Not that the many lives that he ended up living were all that bad.
• ‘Serial Survivor’ by Derek Daly is published by Evro and is out now
