(Photo: Ryan Daley | The Podium Finish)
After an up-and-down start to the season, Michael McDowell has found some consistency for Front Row Motorsports.
In the last five races, McDowell has finished in the top-15 three times, including top-10 finishes at Bristol Dirt and Talladega the last two weeks.
Ahead of Sunday’s race at Dover Motor Speedway, McDowell is 23rd in points after sitting 26th before Bristol. He’s just 62 points below the cutline with 16 races remaining in the regular season.
“It’s been nice this last couple of weeks to have some solid finishes,” McDowell said in a media availability Wednesday. “That’s definitely the best start that we’ve had minus last year, and I think there’s a lot of potential with this Next Gen car for us to have more good results and be in contention.”
McDowell finished 30th at Richmond Raceway on April 3 and 25th at Martinsville Speedway on April 9, multiple laps off the pace in both races.
But, McDowell turned his misfortunes around with a ninth-place finish at Bristol.
“I was happy,” McDowell said. “My crew chief, Blake Harris, he’s got a tremendous amount of dirt experience from a driving standpoint and from a crew chief standpoint, so I felt like I had a little bit of an upper hand in that regard of somebody that really understood how the track was changing.”
On Sunday, McDowell finished eighth at Talladega to pace Ford. He’s finished in the top 10 in four of the last six superspeedway races dating back to his 2021 Daytona 500 victory.
“We salvaged a good finish out of it,” McDowell said after Sunday’s race. “We got ourselves in position there at the end when it counted. I thought with three to go that something was going to happen so I repositioned myself and built a run and was able to weave through there on the last lap.”
This weekend, the NASCAR Cup Series heads to Dover for the DuraMAX Drydene 400 presented by RelaDyne. McDowell has just one top 20 finish at the track, but hopes to continue his strong stretch.
Sunday’s race has many unknowns. It’ll be the first time the Next Gen car races at Dover, a fast-paced, banked, one-mile oval. It’s also the first race for the new car on a concrete surface.
“This tire in general being wider and obviously, with the wheels, seems to cool a lot better than our previous car, so a lot of the wear issues and things have been different,” he said. “Typically there on a green track, a track that doesn’t have any rubber, you’re only about 10 or 15 laps into it before you start seeing cords, and so in that 20-minute practice that we have, I’m not sure if we’ll have a good indication of where things are at.”
Although McDowell is within reach of the playoffs on points, he said they’ll likely need to win a race to clinch a spot.
“You’re always thinking about winning a race,” he said. “We’re not thinking about pointing our way into it. I mean, it is possible. We’re still early in this season, but we look at it as we have to win to have a spot in that, so we’re just focusing on giving ourselves the best chance at that.”
Though McDowell has had success in the last two races, he feels the team has yet to maximize its potential in 2022.
“Even though we’ve had some good runs the last couple of weeks I don’t feel like we’re where we need to be,” he said. “We’re not there yet, but I feel like we have all the things that we need to get there.”
Sunday’s DuraMAX Drydene 400 presented by RelaDyne is at 3 p.m. ET on FS1.
