It was the third time Blickensderfer has walked into victory lane at the World Center of Racing. He knows that wins at Daytona aren’t easy to come by and he considers himself fortunate to have three of them.
“I’ve been lucky,” said Blickensderfer of his Daytona success. “Someone said the other day they looked up my stats here and they’ve been really good. This is a place that’s such a crapshoot, because at Talladega (Superspeedway, Daytona’s sister track) they haven’t been good and it’s a similar style of racing. I think when you look at guys that run good here as drivers, they embrace it and they love it. They’re not thinking about not getting wrecked, but about how they can win the race.
“I love coming to Daytona — whether it’s the Fourth of July or the second race of the season, or it’s the first race of the season — coming to Daytona is a super-exciting time for me,” he added. “I love the aspect of the racing. The last few years, these have been my chances to win races as a crew chief, so that’s helped me embrace some of the love to come down here. When it was more of a handling race track, I really liked that part of it, and now that the strategy has kind of changed, I’ve embraced that. It’s a place unlike Talladega, where it gets clogged up at the end of the race and you have to be at the front.
“I don’t know if it’s luck or not, but either way, I’m going to keep riding it.”
As he looks toward the rest of the season, Blickensderfer has to shift his mindset from that of crew chief to one of “playoff-bound crew chief,” considering McDowell’s victory locks the No. 34 Front Row Motorsports team into the 10-race postseason later this fall.
It’s an exciting change and one that serves as “the next step” for a team that is trying to become a regular contender, Blickensderfer noted.
“We are getting better. We are one of the NASCAR teams that is getting bigger and better every year,” he said. “We’re not trying to downsize and we’re not cutting corners. We’re trying to get better and it might be in small steps that might not always be obvious, but that’s why I wanted to come over here.
“This is going to be a whirlwind the next couple days and then I’ll have to get jammed into the road course and know what’s going on there. Heck, it might be a fun time the next couple days and I won’t even leave Daytona and just end up staying down here until the road course race,” Blickensderfer laughed. “But I’m one of these guys that I think I can only take so much information at a time and I don’t look that far out. I’m looking at the next six, seven, eight weeks of races … on what we need to do to prepare for all that. I feel like I get clogged up and not focused as much as I need to be on next week.
“Now that we’ve won, I need to take some time and say, ‘These are the cutoff races and the first few races in the playoffs, so what do we need to do better to be more prepared for those?’ We’ll get there.”