Michael McDowell has been waiting for this moment.
Heading into the 18th NASCAR Cup Series race of the season, the Front Row Motorsports driver is enjoying his most competitive season yet.
Though he lacks the race win he had in 2021 with his surprise Daytona 500 victory, the 37-year-old driver has ticked off six top-10 finishes so far. That tops his previous best of five that he earned in all of last season. His most recent came on June 12 when he placed third at Sonoma (Calif.) Raceway for his best-career finish on a road course.
However, McDowell isn’t surprised.
“My initial reaction is this is how I anticipated we would run this year, I really did,” McDowell told reporters this week. “I know it might sound easy to say now that we’re doing it, but I told Bob Jenkins, our owner, last year that this is what I’ve been waiting for. I’ve been waiting for this Next Gen car and the reason I feel that is I felt really confident at what I was doing with the cars that we had and extracting the most out of it and, more than anything, just confident with how it’s going with everything.”
However, McDowell is surprised at the “consistency” he’s been able to produce in his No. 34 Ford.
“I knew that there would be moments that if we hit right and we have all the same parts and pieces that we were gonna be able to contend,” McDowell said. “I was really confident with that, but now that we’re doing it consistently, that’s probably what I’m most impressed with with our team and with our group is that it’s not just a short track, it’s not just an intermediate, it’s not just a superspeedway or a road course.”
In 17 races, McDowell’s top 10s have come in the Daytona 500 (seventh), at Bristol dirt (ninth), Talladega (Ala.) Superspeedway(eighth), Darlington (S.C) Raceway (seventh), the Coke 600 at Charlotte (eighth) and Sonoma.
“We’re covering all of them,” McDowell observed. “The next step for us is to be able to do that throughout the entirety of this season, and that’s the question mark that we don’t know.”
The next stop on the season is a special one for McDowell.
The Cup Series makes its return to Road America in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin this weekend (3 p.m. ET Sunday on USA Network). McDowell considers the 4-mile road course his favorite and best track. It’s where he earned his first national NASCAR series win in 2016 when he won the Xfinity Series race there.
As a kid who grew up in the desert of Arizona, McDowell was enthralled with the facility when he first visited it.
“The first time I went there I just remember … to see Wisconsin and see this big, four-mile, magnificent racetrack with rolling hills and green grass and trees and all the scenery, it’s just an amazing facility,” McDowell said. “A really cool place to not only challenge yourself as a driver, but really put your machine and yourself to the test.”
One of the qualities attributed early on to the new Next Gen car is that it would drive similarly to sports cars. That should appeal to McDowell, who has a history in that discipline from competing in NASCAR’s Rolex Grand-Am Series more than 15 years ago.
But after two races on a road course — at Circuit of The Americas in Texas and Sonoma – how does McDowell compare the Next Gen car to what he’s raced with before?
“A Cup car is completely unique compared to every other discipline that I have done (excluding Xfinity),” McDowell said. “I thought the Next Gen car would be kind of a step between our old car and a sports car, and other than the shifting, it really hasn’t been.
“I don’t say that negatively. The brakes are better and we don’t have brake fade. We don’t have wheel-hop. Our transmissions are really good, but our car is still pretty heavy and so the difference between a 2,200-pound prototype and a 3,500-pound stock car is still pretty significant, and so your style is still pretty similar to how it was with the old car. Sonoma, I felt like was the first kind of test for that. COTA is unique, but Sonoma is always a high wear, had to keep the rear tires on it, all about drive. It was no different this year. It really wasn’t. From the very first lap I was like, ‘Oh, man. You’re gonna have to be gentle on this throttle or you’re gonna burn your tires up.’ That part hasn’t changes a whole lot.”
What is McDowell’s confidence level that he can come away from Road America with his second NASCAR Cup win?
“You have to be a top 10, top-five guy regularly to go and win at a speedway or at a road course,” McDowell said. “We feel like we’re close to that now and so I think for the first time we always circle road courses as these could be our best races and typically they are (along) with the superspeedways, but that used to be a top 10, where now we’re running top 10 regularly and so these need to be top fives and a chance at winning.
“So we feel like we could do that this weekend and that we’re close to having all the bits and pieces as a team and chemistry with pit stops and everything it takes to execute. I think we’re honing in on it.”