Conway out to repay Toyota’s faith

Mike Conway is determined to repay the Toyota top brass for his promotion to a permanent drive in the World Endurance Championship, ahead of the season-opening Six Hours of Silverstone. 

After initially joining the team as test and reserve driver alongside a planned second season with Millennium Racing in LMP2 – which was sadly curtailed due to a budget shortage – the Briton was called up to replace Kazuki Nakajima on three occasions due to the Japanese’s prior commitments in Super GT and Super Formula and took a maiden win in Bahrain.

Conway gave up his unique road and street course-only IndyCar ride with Ed Carpenter Racing, which yielded a second career victory at Long Beach last year, to go full-time at Toyota, a decision which he has so far had no cause to regret.

After winning in Bahrain, Conway has been given a
full-season drive in 2015 (Adrenal Media) 

“It’s obviously what I wanted when I came to the team, so to finally get it is awesome,” Conway said at the series launch in London. “Last year there was a lot of pressure on me filling in for people and you’ve got to do the best possible job under the circumstances, but thankfully it was good enough to be put in there full-time. I’ve got to work even harder now with Alex and Steph to really prepare for the season ahead." 

Conway relished the opportunity to be a part of a championship-winning operation last season, but is now ready to shoulder more of the responsibility himself as Toyota look to defend their drivers and manufacturers titles. But Conway is well aware that with the competition making big strides over the winter, it will be anything but easy.

“Everyone feels good about last year and what they’ve achieved, it was great to be a part of it and brings everyone that confidence and an extra spring in their step,” he said. “It’s hard to win a championship, but it’s even harder to maintain it, with more competition out there it makes our job harder. It will be good to have Nissan on board as well, it just makes it better for the series, bringing more cars, creating more interest and more drivers out there – everybody is very fast!

"It’s going to be tough; we already knew that we had found a good chunk [of laptime] but everyone else has done the same, so you don’t really know where you stack up until we get out for qualifying. I’m really happy with where we’re at right now, but it’s going to be a long, hard year and we’ve got to keep working at it.”