SPOTLIGHT
McDowell’s Unlikely Road to Winning the Daytona 500 BY JARED TURNER
•• Michael McDowell struck the jackpot at Daytona, winning the Daytona 500. It was his first win in 358 races.
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ore than a decade ago when he was serving as the motor coach driver for Trevor Bayne, Michael McDowell didn’t fit the profile of someone who most people expected to ever end up in a NASCAR Cup Series Victory
Lane. Struggling to get his own racing career off the ground, McDowell bounced around from underfunded, back-marker team to underfunded, back-marker team and even had to compete as a start-and-park driver for several agonizing seasons. Even once McDowell finally entered into a modestly better situation, driving full time for the single-car Leavine Family Racing organization, pretty much no one harbored any grand illusions of McDowell winning a NASCAR Cup Series race. And that even included his wife, Jami. “She was just like, ‘Man, I don’t think it’s in the cards,’” McDowell said. Then came Feb. 14, 2021. A day that changed everything. A that day McDowell will remember forever. Making his 358th start in NASCAR’s top division, McDowell finally won a race – and it just so happened to be the biggest race of all, the Daytona 500. Turns out McDowell had believed for many years that he would eventually prevail at NASCAR’s highest level, even if no one else shared his line of thinking. “Just for whatever reason, I’m always like, ‘It’s going to happen. I just know it is,’” McDowell said after his victory in the 63rd annual Daytona 500. “I don’t know why I’ve had that feeling. But I also feel like if I don’t come to the race track thinking like that, then why am I coming to the race track?” McDowell has endured plenty of dark days as a driver, though. After all, it took him 10 years in the NASCAR Cup Series just to be able to run a full season. “I wouldn’t say like there were super lows where I was eating Top Ramen noodles and scraping to stay alive, but when you show up to the race track and you know that you’re just in the way, taking up space, it’s hard to do that year after year and week after week,” McDowell said. “So, you’ve got to have a bigger purpose than that. For me, it was knowing that I would get an opportunity eventually.” McDowell’s best opportunity to date came in 2018 when team owner Bob Jenkins handed him the keys to the No. 34 Front Row Motorsports car. Despite being hardly a powerhouse compared with the sport’s top teams, Front Row has offered McDowell more stability than his previous assignments. Even though Front Row can’t compete on a consistent basis with the likes of Hendrick
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POLE POSITION 2021
PRESENTED BY Motorsports, Joe Gibbs Racing, Stewart-Haas Racing and Team Penske, McDowell has a proven, veteran crew chief in Drew Blickensderfer and a team with solid primary sponsorship from Love’s Travel Stops & Country Stores. “It’s been a tough road for me,” McDowell said. “I’ve had to spend a lot of years grinding it out, but I finally have felt like these last four years have been more competitive and produced greater opportunities with Front Row and Bob Jenkins. “Daytona has been so good to us that we’ve been in the top 10, we’ve been in the top five, we’ve been close. The last lap, there’s been times where I’ve made the wrong choice, wrong lane and pushed the wrong guy, and it’s just so hard to get in position and to do it.” McDowell was justifiably optimistic heading into this year’s Daytona 500. In 19 previous pointspaying starts at Daytona International Speedway, he had recorded six top-10 finishes – including a pair of top-five results, the most recent of which was a fifth-place finish in the 2019 running of The Great American Race. Although McDowell may not have been on hardly anyone’s shortlist of favorites to win this year’s Daytona 500, the 36-year-old Glendale, Arizona, native felt upbeat when race morning arrived. “I know it’s going to sound crazy, but I always think I’m going to win this race,” McDowell later said. McDowell’s positive attitude carries over to life in general and is largely influenced by his Christian faith, which has been a source of strength for him for a long time, including during his leanest and most frustrating years in NASCAR. “God just has a plan for each of us, and I just never felt like it was time for me to stop and it was time for me to quit,” said McDowell, who made his NASCAR Cup Series debut in 2008 with now-defunct Michael Waltrip Racing. “I just always felt like there’s a win
PHOTOGRAPHY: GETTY IMAGES
